The moments before a promising cast are charged with nervous anticipation. A countdown launch, that fifteen minutes in the coffee shop before ascending the Park View Towers where I closed that deal, or the moments before I leaned in to kiss my future wife for the first time 鈥 though she鈥檇 hate the comparison. I felt it the first time my son stepped up to a steelhead run on the Dean River in British Columbia.
The water was light jade, and this rainbow would see everything. The first cast counted. Nuru smiled, nodded and stepped back.
鈥淵ou make the cast,鈥 I said 鈥
Bio:
Henry Hughes鈥 fiction has recently appeared in Harvard Review, Gray鈥檚 Sporting Journal, and South Dakota Magazine. He is the author of the memoir Back Seat with Fish: A Man鈥檚 Adventures in Angling and Romance and the editor of the Everyman鈥檚 anthologies The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, Fishing Stories, and River Poems. His commentary on new writing appears regularly in Harvard Review.