Fishnet

Photography by Jasmine Leng, staff writer.

She kneels on the dock pulling up a mass of tangled net; a red snapper flashes angrily in the dying light. I’m here because my mother says I need to make friends and because her arrogant teenage wisdom keeps me hooked, so I stay to listen when she tells me about fishnets and capitalism.

“This is where it begins,” she begins. A fishnet that barely retains memories of its extant ancestor the spiderweb.

Apparently, the Ancient Greeks once corked blood with spider silk, so the fabric has whispered of silver conflict since before Homer’s time (totally irrelevant, of course, but she loves Greek mythology).

Then she begins, this whole monologue in a murmur that dies before reaching the water.

Spiderwebs hung above the fermenting faces of workers dripping wine for monopolists, dined on insects attracted to the fleshrot. They watched the processing of garden-variety anchovies, harvested and placed dead on controversial pizzas, simple anatomy bared. A village of thought turns into a mindless metropolis—forgetting, forgetting, forgetting. Events slip out windows like sand, the wind carries it off to continue its labor of desertification, another supernova and no one flinches—imagine. How threads evolve from catching flies to scooping fish to trapping dreams, moving up some degenerate ecological chain.

She cracks open the cooler and offers me a Coke. The metal cools my sweaty palm and I don’t say anything.

The nets are drawn in by the trawlers when all is turned to dark shadow. The knocking of rope against boat betrays life’s presence and I don’t say anything.

Jasmine Leng is a high school student from Massachusetts. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the National Poetry Contest. She loves playing the piano, learning foreign languages, and dreaming of living inside the Grand Canyon or on a small dairy farm.