Fishing for Atonement

This is one of two award-winning short stories from the 2025 Next Generation Short Story Awards – Anthology of Winners. Fishing for Atonement is a chapter from a longer work of fiction that is still under construction – but stands on its own as a short story. Scroll down the home page to find Sandpiper Feet, the second story published in this anthology. The competition and book are supported by the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the largest international awards program for indie authors and independent publishers. For those of you who prefer holding a book in your hands, you can find it at Headline Books (scroll down to “Next Generation”) or at Amazon here.

Like the day before, and the day before that, the hitchhiker started this day beneath a cottonwood grove draped in hanging robes of Spanish moss. This day was different however, because a rare breeze stirred the Mississippi air and brought a checkerboard smile to his face. Like the people in his life, most of his teeth had abandoned him years before. Friends and bicuspids were nothing but memories now. He closed his eyes and listened to the mesmerizing symphony of the cicada in the trees overhead. Their song rippled through the branches, gracefully rising and falling with the wind. The sound became the wind and its melody moved the silver moss into a soprano sonata that captivated the hitchhiker until the breeze descended once again into the trembling vibrato of the insect’s call.

Earlier that morning the hitchhiker attempted to capture his thinning grey hair in a ponytail, but uncooperative strands sprouted beneath his hat like the gossamer moss that hung from the trees. His rebellious hair joined the swaying branches and the hitchhiker was swept up in nature’s dance. His arms rose with the music and he swirled gently through the cottonwood seedlings that collected like snowdrifts around his ankles. The forest reminded him of his mother’s silver shawl draped over the emerald gown she wore in the ballroom dance competitions he sometimes remembered in his dreams. He wrapped his arm around his mother’s waist and they whirled gracefully across the dancehall floor.

The sound of a new wind, a more urgent wind, pulled the hitchhiker from his reverie. He opened his eyes to see a crimson convertible slow and come to a stop. He examined the car from hood to trunk before his eyes settled on the stranger behind the wheel. The man carried with him an air of self-assuredness and certainty that was common among ex-military men. He looked like a man who could deliver a righteous sermon or a righteous uppercut, depending on what was called for.

The hitchhiker considered his own wretched physique in return. It bore the lumps and hollows of a war fought halfway around the world and an antiwar movement fought closer to home. In the former he acquired a leg full of shrapnel from the Vietcong; in the latter, he acquired three broken ribs from a Chicago police sergeant.

The stranger spoke first. “Where you headed?”

“Well sir, I don’t rightly know where I’m headed. I’m waiting for the good Lord to make up his mind.”

The stranger considered this and replied, “Can I drop you somewhere while you’re waiting?”

“Yes sir, I suppose you can. I’m just going up the road to my favorite fishing hole. It ain’t far but I don’t walk quite so good as I used to.”

“Stow your gear behind the seat and get in.”

“Thank you, sir. I won’t be no bother.” The hitchhiker placed his oversized bucket and fishing gear behind the seat and eased his troubled body into the convertible.

The stranger slipped the car into gear and continued north. “That’s the third time you called me sir. Are you a military man?”

“Yes sir. 26th Marines.” The hitchhiker paused before adding, “But that was a long time ago.”

“No need to call me sir. The name’s Michael.”

“My mother always said you can trust a man with a good biblical name.” The hitchhiker paused to assemble the memory and added, “Michael … Saint Michael, the Archangel they called the Angel of Death; come to escort a man to the pearly gates at the hour of his death.” The hitchhiker thought a bit, then added, “Providing he’s deemed worthy of course.”

“You seem to know your Bible, soldier.”

“I made a point of knowing my Bible after what I seen and done in Vietnam.”

“Were you in Khe Sanh?”

The hitchhiker considered Michael and reached a conclusion; a soldier always knows when he’s talking to a brother-in-arms. “Seventy-seven days we kept Charlie at bay. We bent but we never broke … ‘course we lost a lot of good men.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

The hitchhiker ignored the opportunity to change the subject. “God Himself sent men into mortal combat, so I figure killing in war is different than murder. That’s why I’m hoping God will give me a pass for the things I done.” He contemplated the passing woods and found no divination there. “But I’m not holding my breath.”

The corner of Michael’s mouth curled northward. “And that’s why you’re waiting for the Lord to make up his mind?”

The hitchhiker narrowed his eyes and stared hard at the stranger. “Some things are too terrible to forgive, mister. Some things are worthy of eternal damnation.” He wondered what compelled him to open up to this man, to expose the raw nerve of his memories and confess his sins.

“Regret is a cancer, mister. Memories get all bunched up inside a man’s gut until they turn poisonous.” He absentmindedly rubbed his stomach as if checking for tumors. “It’s always a memory that stirs up that toxic lump of remorse inside a man. Sometimes it goes into remission but one day a song on the radio or a scene outside the car window triggers a memory and regret starts all over again. He hopes it won’t stick, but he knows it will. He thinks it won’t grow, but it always does. He prays it will go away but he knows it’s gonna come back. Remorse sinks its teeth into a man in the middle of the night and won’t let loose until he’s drenched in sweat and praying for the daylight to come.”

The convertible entered a clearing scarred by towering power lines that cast flickering shadows over the hitchhiker’s eyes. Beneath the cables lie a junkyard, the final resting ground for rusted cars and trucks piled three and four high. Like the enemy we buried after the siege. The hitchhiker shifted in his seat to block the sun and the memory before it could take hold in his gut.

They slipped back into the shade where the convertible offered a view of the trees and their shimmering moss shawls that the hitchhiker rarely saw. Once again, he thought of his mother waltzing across the ballroom floor in the dance competitions she enjoyed with his father. He hadn’t thought about his parents in years. His father fought in World War II and lost an arm at the Battle of Iwo Jima. His mother was a Navy nurse and lost her husband to whiskey.

The hitchhiker realized Michael was talking to him.

“I said, the Lord forgives a penitent man.”

“Does he? I did what I could to get right with the man upstairs, but I won’t know which way the wind blows until the judgement day comes.”

“And if the wind blows to heaven? What then?”

“Heaven? Heaven is sitting beside a river with a fishing pole in my hands. It’s the most peaceful thing on Earth and as close to heaven as a man can get.” He let his eyes close and his imagination open. “In the morning, the mist rises from the water and it’s like living inside an impressionist painting. A cool wind sweeps away the fog and there’s an egret wading in the shallow water, searching for breakfast. Then the breeze stirs the wild anise bushes that grow at the water’s edge and puts the sweet smell of licorice in the air.” He opened his eyes and added, “That’s the smell of my dad. He always kept licorice in his pocket.

“The egret takes flight and then there’s nothing but me and a single fish in the whole world. I sense him below the surface and he senses me above. He nibbles at the bait and the bobber dances a tiny jig, nearly imperceptible if not for the circles it sends across the water’s surface. I lay the fishing line across my palm and feel him testing me. I slowly take the slack out of the line but not enough to give myself away. Will he outsmart me or will I be frying fish for dinner?”

The hitchhiker turned to Michael and said, “If Saint Peter decides I’m worthy, I surely hope there are fishing holes in heaven.” Then he chuckled and added, “But if he decides I’m a bad bet, I know what I’ll find in Hell because I’ve already been to ‘Nam and that’s about as close to Hell as a man can get without taking the trouble to die.”

Michael remained silent. The hitchhiker continued unprompted.

“I deployed in ’67 but my tour was cut short when I caught some flak from a mortar shell. That was in April of ’68, right after the 7th Calvary broke through enemy lines and saved our asses.” The hitchhiker sniffed and turned his head away from Michael. “Jesus Christ, I haven’t talked about this stuff in years.”

Michael winced at the blasphemy but said nothing.

“It’s just that I lost the best friend a man could ever have during that siege. Murray went to grab us a couple of drinks and I never saw him again. We had this running gag where he’d offer me a beer or a soda. As soon as I reached for it, he’d pull it back and take a big slug from the can. Then he’d give me the can and open a fresh one for himself.

“The thing is, it was me who asked Murray to get us something to drink that last time. I knew mine would be half drunk when he gave it to me, but it was worth the laugh.” The pain collected in his throat and he swallowed hard to get past it. “It was a mortar shell that killed Murray, just like the one that nearly took me.”

“That’s a hard thing to live with.”

“I didn’t get over it for years. It was my wife Betsy who helped me through the darkness. When I came home, I was angry and I got involved in the Anti-War Movement. I met Betsy during the protests at the ’68 Democratic Convention up in Chicago.” The hitchhiker grinned and said, “She had this makeshift care station set up at a big water fountain in Grant Park. She was soaking strips of cloth in the water and passing them out to the protesters who got tear-gassed. I came up to her, my eyes burning and my ribs aching from the clubbing I just took. She placed a wet cloth over my eyes and lay me down in the grass to recuperate.

“She was wearing this big flowery skirt that went all the way to the ground. She always dressed like that; she called it a peasant skirt. Anyway, when she ran out of rags and towels, she started ripping strips off the bottom of that skirt so’s she could keep treating the protesters. The more tear gas the cops threw at us, the shorter that skirt got.” A short laugh escaped his mouth. “By the end of the day, she was wearing a miniskirt and I was rooting for the cops to keep it up.”

“I bet you were,” chuckled Michael.

“We got married a couple of months later. Before she died, it was Betsy who introduced me to the Lord and set me on the road to atonement.”

The shade deepened as the cottonwood grove gave way to a cypress marsh. The Spanish moss hung lower in the swamp, descending in long, pearly pillars that tickled the water’s surface and released tentative circles to probe its boundaries. Speckled sunlight meandered through the leaves and illuminated thousands of flecks in the air. The atmosphere weighed heavily on the hitchhiker and he felt helpless against the weariness that forced his eyes shut. A kaleidoscope of flickering light and shadow danced inside his eyelids and he seemed weightless, as if the convertible’s momentum were lifting him from his seat. He spread his arms and imagined himself floating above the car. He rose up on a wave of the cicada’s song and drifted through the upper branches of the cypress trees.

The pains of his earthly body fell away and he dared not open his eyes for fear the feeling might be lost. In his mind’s eye, the bog’s surface became a dance floor and he spotted his mother and father twirling through the shimmering moss pillars. Like the swaying moss, their footsteps sent fluid circles rippling over the surface. His mother looked up at the hitchhiker and winked, just like she did when he was a boy and the dancehall judges weren’t looking. They twirled behind a tree and she emerged on the other side with a new dance partner. From his perch high above, he saw it was his ten-year-old self and he heard his mother whisper in his ear, One … two … three … four. Back … two … three … four.

A distant train whistle joined the music and rose in an overpowering crescendo that quickly obliterated all other sound. It shook the images inside the hitchhiker’s dream and the vision crumbled around him. For a moment he felt himself falling and he woke with a start to find himself sitting on his upturned bucket at his favorite fishing hole. The train whistle faded and he turned to see the last car pass over the trestle and disappear into the woods. He called out for Michael but only the cicadas answered.

What a strange dream, he thought. He felt a twitch on his finger and looked down to see the fishing line in his palm. The bobber dipped and sent tiny ripples across the water’s surface. He closed his eyes and immersed himself in the strange wind that carried not only the song of the cicada but also the sweet smell of licorice. The wind seemed to put on weight and wrap its arms around him like a mother’s hug.

The hitchhiker opened his eyes and there stood Murray with a beer in each hand. Behind Murray he spotted a flowered peasant skirt billowing in the breeze and in that moment he knew, at long last, which way the wind blew.