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Lucy rotated her fishing rod in an instant. “I felt a bite,” she said, “and the little people made the handle of this thing too delicate.”
The little people, of course, was her word for Homo Sapiens. She never used the phrase around Professor Magdalene or any of the guests of the park. But when she was among her kind, she didn’t hesitate. The Sapiens were the ‘little people’, and we, the Neanderthals, were the ‘normal people’.
Lucy was right about the bite. When the line was out of the water we could see her prize, a wiggling fish the size of my fist. But Lucy’s speed and unique fishing technique led the scaly wiggling creature to slam right into my face.
“Hahaha,” Lucy laughed, her booming voice drowning out the sounds of insects on the lake. She grabbed the fish off my face, pulled it off the hook, and tossed it in the ice box. It still writhed and flipped around a while, gasping for life.
“I should have brought my sunglasses,” I said to Lucy. “That fish put lake water in my eye.”
“The sun is bright today,” said Lucy, with a smile. “Can’t see a single cloud.”
She wiped some sweat from her brow while I wiped cold freshwater off my face. There wasn’t much space in this boat for the two of us, the fishing supplies, and our lunch. The greenhouse gases of the twenty-first century atmosphere were heating up our ice age bodies.
But Lucy didn’t mind the heat. “This is the life,” she said. “Out on the water, among the trees and bugs and fish.”
“What if we ran into a moose?” I asked.
“The two of us could totally wrestle a moose,” she said. “Well, maybe we’d need to bring Mark. That would be awesome. Too bad it’s against park regulations.”
Each part was written in 15 minutes during a Joy of Writing session. This is in the same setting as Fatty & Kingdom.