The old man is up at dawn, as the sun waxes pale atop the ocean's ridge, and he eats a sparse breakfast of bread and fish at the round table next to the window. There he can see better the water, the heavy, gray waves shattering against dark rocks. He lives in a shack of oak timber, overlooking the beach. Every morning he rises at the same time.

The autumn wind is icy and coarse, and it howls in from its northern berth and goads the water into graphitic breakers, which thrash and foam up the shore and darken the sand. The old man dons his fur coat, his hat, his leather gloves. He packs a bread lunch then descends the spine and accesses the jetty extending into the waterfront, where his fishing boat bobs up and down, moored to the end post by a thick rope. 

The fishing boat is a birchwood dory with a curved hull, a narrow transom, and a single seat. The old man built her himself years ago, and the rig is still sea-worthy, despite worn paint and barnacles rimming the bow. Stratus clouds have congealed overhead. The sky is ashen, coated in lambent water-color smudges. It casts not a single shadow.

The old man clambers in, untethers the dory, and disembarks, as he does every morning, and he will remain at sea until the afternoon. His is a cast-net of knitted wool. It rests beneath a latch built into the stern, until he removes it and tosses it over the waves, where the net sways and trembles like a web.

He fishes a quarter mile from the shore-line, where the shoals of herring aggregate; where the wind smells of brine and the shore is a dark ribbon cresting the waves. His wooden vessel bobs and creaks, swells smacking the hull, but the old man is an able sailor, swaying languidly, removing a pipe and striking a match against a dry section of wood. The ocean is his haunt. His asylum. It gave birth to the land, and the land gave birth to women, and women gave birth to men. And the ocean giveth, and the ocean taketh away. 

Every half-hour, he hauls in another catch, and the cast-net foams and thrashes with quicksilver bodies. Hoisting the net over the paneling, the old man pries it open and watches the herring slide into the ice box; then he casts again. 

He returns to shore. He loads his catch into a dolley and trundles the dolley south a half-mile to the coastal town of Whitstead, and there the old man trades fish for bread; says nary a word to any of the denizens, most of whom consider him mute.

The old man cuts a decrepit figure. His skin is like old leather. Brown wineskins hang beneath his eyes, and his blue irises burn strangely as if to brand the whites pink, sear the rims and the skin. His steel-wool beard hangs to his chest, the color of bleached coral, and his scalp is concealed beneath a fur hat. He keeps to the side of the road, examines the dirt. Perhaps the answer to an archaic riddle runs through the dry channels and estuaries there. 

Passersby nod cordially to him, wondering, in secret, at the dark oceans swimming beneath his eyes--how deep how wide stretches the abyssal plane.

Once at home again, the old man kindles a fire and eats a supper of bread and soup. He sits cross-legged before the hearth, hums quietly to himself a cheerful melody he heard play through a phonograph once, a melody that animated dance halls before it became a soft dirge in a shack by the sea. The fire thrashes and coils, manifesting ephemeral shapes, traces of memories--the twirl of skirt, the flash of a crooked smile. The old man hums as if to perform an unholy rite. 

The eventide is pink beneath the horizon when he takes to bed. The coastal swells drone a rolling mantra--seething, purring, seething again. And the old man drifts-off, and he dreams of her dark silhouette advancing up the shore, of the tide purling around her tattered gown, of her yellow hair strewn over her cheeks and down her shoulders, hanging with kelp and fishing lures and broken sections of coral; of her empty face, lost to the chasm beneath his memory.

He dreams, and in the dream, he weeps.