A short story about a shack, its keeper, a crab, and a misplaced Tuesday.
Nobody had caught a fish at No Fish for seventeen years, three months, and five days. Nobody had caught anything else either.
This was not, as the Cove of Unproductive Waters insisted, a fishing problem. Fishing problems could be solved with better nets, improved bait, or the occasional stern conversation with sea. No Fish was a matter of geography.
You see, the trouble began when the sea misplaced Tuesday.
Not the day itself, but the place where Tuesday was supposed to happen. It had been a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, according to the harbourmaster’s log, until a passing storm picked it up, shook it like a wet dog, and dropped it somewhere beyond the eastern shoals. The coast smelled of it for weeks. A town called Yes Fish sold it in small glass bottles as Eau de Damp Dog, and it was surprisingly popular. By Wednesday morning, the sea had developed a peculiar vacancy, and everything that swam through it began arriving somewhere else.
Most things arrived eventually. The mackerel turned up in the fountains of Bellweather, the crabs took over a monastery three hundred miles inland, and a particularly offended octopus spent six months drinking tea at Sea Shell Kettle o’ Shore.
But nothing arrived at No Fish.
Marrick kept the shack. Rumour had it he inherited it from a distant uncle who got lost in his own home. Marrick wasn’t sure of it himself; “it” being the rumour about his uncle, or his inheritance. Over years rather than days, weeks or months, and rather lazily, he had tried everything you could expect to be tried at a shack named No Fish. He had offered the sea a written apology, although he did so while prancing around happily on silver sands. He had played the national anthem of his very own making. Totally out of tune, making sea gulls very suspicious. He had even thrown in an entire wedding cake (give or take a few bites; actually, more give than take), which returned three mornings later, neatly iced and addressed to somebody called The Secret Society of Missing Afternoons.
After that, he (rather happily) put up the sign: NO FISH.
It discouraged wanderers, saved him a fortune in bait, and attracted the sort of souls who preferred their mysteries properly labelled.
On the morning in question, a small red crab appeared on the beach.
Marrick watched it cross the shingle, climb the rocks, and stare at him in a funny way.
“You’re late,” he told it, awkwardly.
In answer, the crab silently opened a chest that Marrick had not noticed before. It had been there all along, which was rather the point of it.
Inside lay seventeen years’ worth of Tuesdays, folded into small blue squares. Some were damp. One was still ticking. Another had a tiny tree growing through it.
Marrick studied it all with a slight tilt of his head. His dreadlocks, a moment behind, slithered over one shoulder.
“Ah,” he said. “That explains the fish.”
The crab produced a sheet of paper and pushed it across the counter. It was a notice of eviction, signed by the sea itself.
Apparently, No Fish had never been a fishing shack. It had been a waiting room. A place where misplaced things could sit quietly until the world remembered where they belonged.
Unfortunately, the sea had forgotten the waiting room, too.
Marrick looked out at the water. For the first time in seventeen years, three months, and five days, something rippled beneath the surface.
“Well,” he said, reaching for his coat. “I suppose we’d better open the door.”
He walked down to the end of the pier and knocked on the sea.
From somewhere very far away came a sound like a cupboard hopping around on a damp mattress stuffed with angry ducks’ feathers.
Then a voice answered, muffled by several thousand miles of water.
“WHO’S THERE?”
Marrick glanced at the crab. The crab glanced at Marrick.
Neither of them had the faintest idea what to say.
Which was how, on the following morning, the sign at the shack acquired a second line:
NO FISH. NO APPOINTMENTS. PLEASE KNOCK.