TAKE THE BAIT

The sky was grey.

The water was murky.

The day was about as dismal as their relationship. A father sat on rock, fishing, trying to connect with his teenage son who was sat next to him.

It wasn’t working. The only reason he had taken his son with him, fishing, his favourite pastime, was because his wife had made him; it wasn’t voluntary. Her intuition could tell that something was wrong with their son, he wasn’t happy, so she made his father, her husband take him to the river. Fishing is a sacred act between a father and son, a rite of passage that all men should pass on to young men to gift them with a skill of self-sufficiency, but selfishly, the father had always kept his hobby to himself.

Not today. Not on this grey, dismal day that was as uncomfortable as the jagged rock they were sitting on. The father had never given his son the time of day, he was a selfish man who had shirked away from his responsibility – raising his son from boyhood to manhood – and at this critical time of teenage transition, the friction was clear. They sat there, silently, with a tension that could be cut with his blunt fisherman’s knife.