When I was about five years old, we lived in a small apartment on a street called Sierra Road, which I always remember as a mysteriously contoured woman with flowing hair.
It had stairs. I placed a plastic fish on the floor, then went upstairs, sat with my legs swinging through the bannister directly over the fish, and released the end of my jumprope. I did this for several afternoons, waiting patiently to catch the fish.
My father walked by downstairs. I heard him laugh. There was some bustling, then a violent tug on the end of my line. I looked down. Nobody was there. I pulled up my jumprope. My fish was tied to the end of it.
For a long time I was convinced that my experiment worked and I had effectively caught the fish on account of my clear understanding of how fish are caught, nourished by patient men on television. I told my parents; my mom congratulated me warmly and my father just laughed for reasons I didn't get, but in any case I didn't care.
Time went by. I realised I could never have "caught" the plastic fish, it being inert and me having no bait, so I decided it was magic. "God," my mom said. This seemed viable. Someone once pushed me into a fountain and my mother said it was the devil, so it tracked. Later that same day I found a squashed banana I had forgotten about in my backpack, further proof that the devil existed, and thus the divine spectrum upon which he resides.
More time went by. I mostly forgot about this event, and maybe things would have ended there—with me thinking this was divine intervention. Then something made me remember it again, I don't know what. It was only then, years later, that I saw it must have been my dad tampering with the line, because he doesn't respect my the scientific method. It also explained his mysterious laughter and the violence of the tug (he never quite got the measure of his own strength relative to ours).
The end.
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