Reticence

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There was a dead cat in the harbor that morning, a black cat floating slowly on the surface of the water alongside a small boat. It was straight and stiff, and a decomposed fish head hung from its mouth out of which protruded a broken strand of fishing line two or three inches in length. At the time I’d simply imagined the fish head was all that remained of a piece of bait. The cat must have leaned out over the water to catch hold of the fish, and once he’d caught it the hook had become snagged in his mouth, he’d lost his balance and fallen in. The water in the port was very dark where I was, but from time to time I could make out a school of fish swimming silently down below, wrasse or mullet, while down at the bottom among the seaweed and stones swarming myriads of fry went at the gutted corpse of a decomposed moray eel. Before moving on I lingered for a moment on the jetty looking at the dead cat, which continued to drift slowly back and forth in the harbor, first to the left then to the right, following the imperceptible flux and reflux of the current on the surface of the water.

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