I've forgotten a lot about my childhood. A lot of it wasn't worth remembering, some of it I just don't know. Apparently I hurt my left leg badly and that's why I get pain from standing up all day, but I can't remember anything about it happening. I don't remember names, faces. I'm sure I remember reading somewhere about how the part of your brain that remembers those things is finite, that you can only remember around a thousand people before things get shunted out to make room. Which is why celebrities are evil, to remember them you have to forget something, they steal your memories, your soul, with their eyes. And how do you remember events without the people in them?
When I was a kid. I remember fishing. I used to fish a lot but I don't anymore. Fish hooks are terrifying. It was a warm day and around dusk. This was before the oil spill in the harbour that killed off most everything, before they sold the port and it got closed off to people fishing.
There was a small landing between where the Habour Trust area ended and the Alcoa Pier began, I don't know what the purpose of the place was but there were a bunch of granite shards beside it. There are granite shards all over the place in Portland, used to keep the sea away, occasionally drilled with holes where explosive charges were laid when they were rock.
Around sunset a school of mullet surrounded us, orange because of the light on the water. They were schooling and larger than the fish I was used to catching but none of them would take bait. They swam out to the deeper water and we watched them until they turned from silver-orange slivers to nothing, and then we saw the sunfish.
It was taller than it was long and it was distorted by the water and when I told one of the kids at school, one who was a 'sport fisherman' I'd seen it, he told me I was lying because sunfish live in the open ocean, but I saw it and so did Dad and Jason. Damned thing was taller than it was long and near the surface. Probably looking for a way out of the harbour it'd wandered into.
We packed up after that. Didn't catch anything at all that afternoon but that didn't matter, it wasn't the point. I saw a sunfish.