men, he'd
take it from his finger to put on a neck chain, not to lose
the finger as the net went out.
Several tides after that, our aunt, while cleaning some hake,
found a gold ring
in the belly of one of the fish.
Once she'd washed it off, she examined the letters and numbers
engraved
inside. Though it couldn't be true, the date and the initials
were those of our parents'
wedding.
By all appearances, Father himself had caught the hake that had
swallowed the
ring. In all of the wide blue sea.
Peaceable summer nights bring the inland wind, and the
memories.
I look at the sky, and it dawns that coincidences are the planets
with the
amplest orbits.
Only every so often have they come round.
The ring's is far too great a coincidence. It would have been lost
and found in
that same stone sink. But it doesn't matter. What's
most important now is this: for
years and years, the story of the ring
was entirely believable to our child-sized
children's intelligence.
Nights, the ocean has the shimmer of hake.
The stars go leaping around like the scales.
[Kirmen Uribe {1970- } 'The gold ring' - translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin - from Meanwhile Take My Hand]
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