Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Vanya’s day had begun long before and an hour before first light, when she and solemn Kuzetsova had waded into the shallows to check the sunken pens while the sky was still blue like ink. Last night there had been slabs of ice on the river, and some had got in amongst the tanks bending the steel guys and tearing the nets, leaving gaping holes where cruel Koschey could nose and smell the gentle fish. There had been repairs to do, and later the concrete platform in the warehouse had to be hosed down and scrubbed. Kuzetsova, as she did every day, hacked the powder-white ice from the ice machine and bore it in her barrow to a place on the bank downstream of the tanks from where she tipped it into the great river, and to where she would return the next day, patiently and without reproach, bearing another load of ice, always grown end never used, pale and chill like the flesh of Vanya’s fish.

     As for Vanya, there were chutes to clean, boats to mend, and then, if the day’s work went well, she might sit on the end of the long jetty and fish for pike.

     The pike were hungry. They longed to get into the pens and eat the fat river fish. They were as hard and cold in their swift natures as the river was slow and kind. Their dreams were of teeth and long digestions arid swallows of living flesh. Their fishy hearts hearts were not wicked but rather of a quick hunger older than malice. And Koschey — he was the oldest and greatest of his kind, lurking on the river bottom, an aching desire, a hunger, while far above Vanya waited with her rod for him to make his last mistake.

     Vanya knew her fish by name and loved them in her own way, as the purpose of all her work, but like every parent she had, too, the bitter knowledge that one day they might slip away.

     It had been cold last night. Suppose the frost had broken the steel guys so that the nets had fallen from their supports like silk handkerchiefs spreading on the river floor. Well, then, the fish would have floated all away, like ungrateful children, with not so much as a backward stare, arriving at last, those that Koschey spared, far downstream, beyond the thrice—tenth kingdom to the kingdom where the firebird flies.

     Kuzetsova looked up from where she polished the huge brass scales.

     ‘There will be a frost again tonight,’ she said.

     ‘And a cold one,’ agreed Vanya.

     ‘Every year it seems to get earlier.’ her friend sighed.

     Vanya gazed for a while across the river to the buoys that held her precious nets.

     ‘I wonder how Peter is, ‘ she said.