He lived far from there and yet he visited them two or three times a week. It was a widow and her son. Lucia was an old woman, and had lost two sons and a daughter. She now lived with Milo, her second son who was eleven years old, and dedicated her remaining life to making things right for him.

Their visitor was five years older than Milo. He came there to fish for them, and he fished enough for the two for the next half of the week, and left without saying much, often without having uttered a word. He always looked like he was in a bad mood, like he didn’t really want to be there and do it, but was forced to by someone.

He went there against the will of his family, and was caught up in fights with them over his wet clothes and the long time he spent away from them. He didn’t do well in school, and he hadn’t any friends. He would sometimes go directly to Milo after school and reach back home after sunset, and that’s when it got hard for him to make excuses for his mother.

His father had hoped that it was the usual fantasies of a young adult that he was willing to live. Him having no friends and his father being aware of the fact made him ever so lenient on his son. As long as he was safe, back home to bed at night, and out for school in the morning, his father thought it well not to interfere.

Lucia tried to talk to him every time he came. She offered him food sometimes, when she had it, but other times it was her looking down and away in shame, the shame and insecurity that she had gotten accustomed to with the helplessness of poverty. She knew he was doing them a favor and that he was raising Milo just as she was, only she had no way to say thank you, and didn’t know how to.

It was only after he had kept at it for four months that something peculiar had taken place. He had stayed at Milo’s for the night. Never in all that time did he stay the night. It didn’t matter how dark it got or how tired he was from fishing. He always left to go back home. As much as it worried his own mother, Lucia felt a subtle sense of relief, that he had now deemed the house worthy of his stay.

It was a tradition in her family. If you’d stay at someone’s for the night, it meant you had trusted them enough to do so, and now you were a member of the family and part of the home. Lucia thought long and hard looking at his listless body draped over the hard floor. She spread her blanket over him, and shrouded herself in her late husband’s shirt.

There was gratitude within her, but an overwhelm of it by complaint and unrest in her heart. She was uneasy thinking of God, or praying to him, unlike everyone else she had seen in their final years who got closer to him, or at least pretended to be. Nevertheless she could never stop thinking about Him, however uneasily or confusedly.

He woke up the next morning before Milo did. Milo woke up at six, to find him diving into the water with bait tied to his ankle with a thin rope.

“MAMI! MAMI! He’s in the water! The water!” Milo screamed.

“What is it?” She asked him. She stubbed her toe on the way out.

She couldn’t see him. Only the flapping of white water and something slowly descending deep into it.

Underwater, he went through to a place where he could see lights moving above him from the yachts and speedboats that were leaving for the harbor. He could see trickles of the morning sun finding its way through the drops of water as it does through a forest of trees. He felt alive and yet, he felt that he could die at that very moment.

Something pulled down at his leg, and his ankle went sore. He couldn’t feel his body from his chest down anymore. Water fried his eyes red and his nose burned on the inside. He swung his hand down to his leg and pulled at the thread. His palm sliced open. He saw his blood mix in with the sea. He tried to swim upward for a moment but gave up, feeling his legs a burden on his body, and his body a weight on the ocean. But still he held firmly the thread in his hand.

He woke up on the shore, seeing a man in a blue uniform and hat, two men in uniforms as he opened his second eye, pumping his chest. He was sat up by the men as his eyes opened. He sat on the shore with a towel over his head and one over his chest.

His family sat with him. His father scrubbed his back and underarms with the towel. Rubbing dirt off his eyelids he could see Lucia holding Milo tightly between her arms in the distance, and in front of them a weathered fish, half the size of Milo, lying on the sand, with a hook piercing through its mouth attached to a black fiber, tattered with split ends.

His mother and father talked to him. They didn’t ask him any questions. He wanted them to this time. He wanted them to talk to him as rapidly as he was talking to himself.

He went to Lucia himself. He saw her through the plastic curtains in her door. She was cutting the fish. Milo was sitting on their wooden bed. A few minutes later he found the courage to face her and got up to go in. He pushed the curtain to the side, and saw Lucia with a fish kept on a bundle of leaves in her hand, looking up at him. He tried to start talking when she crushed a morsel in her hand and stuffed it in his mouth, smiling wide and reddening the wrinkled curve of her cheek.

She looked at his animated face. He had a dove’s eyes. She looked at his inflated cheek and round lips, and felt that he was no different from Milo. She made him sit on the bed and told him to wait as she cut some more fish. The light of the sun as it approached noon shone through her high window on the picture of Mary. A few minutes later, as she readied the fish, the light had found its way down to the face of Christ. She fed the both of them with her own hands.