Unpublished short fiction

Tobias was born on a boat in the harbor. Back then there was just one God and God was the largest thing. Tobias’s grandfather was a boat captain, and the giant God was in the sea around them, but also in the sky and the birds and the boat. As a boy, Tobias stood on the pebbled foreshore each morning and watched his grandfather don his cap and fisher’s coat and put to sea, then spread his nets and return that afternoon with baskets spilling over with fish, which Tobias’s mother broiled with salted honeycomb.
      Tobias’s grandfather was a religious man. “God gives fish as our provision; we eat what He provides, and on the Sabbath we share what remains” said Tobias’s grandfather, who told him stories of shoals of fish boiling the water around the boat, and of other great fish that could swallow a man or a skiff, oars and all. “Proof of the power of God,” he said. “We have dominion over the fish but He keeps dominion over us.” Every day Tobias sat by the hearth and ate his grandfather’s fish and his family prayed over it, speaking to God through the fish and the boat and the sea.

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3,643 words