Its five o'clock and still dark. I blindly grope around for cigarettes and coffee. It's time to go to work. I slowly gaze at my hands in a kind of detached interest, studying the way the skin on the outside of my fore-fingers has gone white and hard, having been softened by being constantly wet and calloused from pulling on nylon net all the time. I think about how the effect of drying and wetting has combined with swelling and caused the skin to split right along my fingers. I meditate on how both my hands have become claws from pulling on net after net. Nets full of leaves and Mangrove seed pods, nets being dragged by a flooding river on an out-going tide, nets tangled with whole trees flushed from inland, nets caught underwater on pockmarked logs we lovingly labeled 'subterranean nightmares'. It's a funny kind of thing to have hands that don't open properly and hardly close at all. I dread getting into the dinghy and pulling the starter cord on the outboard. I know the pain will shoot through my fingers, into my hands and up my arms. I know it will take four or five pulls to start the outboard.
