Simon looked sadly at the skin grafts on his scarred hands. On his right hand, he missed his little and ring fingers, long since turned into mere stumps. He flexed with difficulty his other three fingers, where their destroyed tendons had been replaced by artificial ligaments made of synthetic polymers.

"Stop looking at your hands," Mary reprimanded him, preventing him from continuing his self-pity. "We have to go to work," she urged him.

Now she was the one driving, carrying the work tools, managing the family business, and talking to customers. The truth was that she had always been more skilled at almost everything than he. He had only shown his skill in one area, which was his passion, fishing.

Simon clumsily handled the squeegee. Cleaning glass was all a cripple could aspire to.

"You always leave a mark," she scolded him again. "Customers pay us to keep their windows spotless."

Before he could reply, she soaped the glass again and with enviable skill removed the small marks Simon had left with his clumsy handling of the cleaning tool. She slid the squeegee over the surface of the glass with the grace of an elegant ice skater. He, on the other hand, moved it in a stumbling, jumping motion, leaving the marks of his clumsiness in his wake. It wasn't his hand that moved with difficulty, it was his mind.

While she was talking to the store owner, taking the opportunity to sell their work, he was picking up the buckets, cloths, squeegees, and extension handles. His look was one of resentment, towards her, towards the world, and above all, towards himself.

At home, he still kept his small room with a closet full of fishing tackle. There were his rods, the fiberglass ones, the graphite ones, and those other ones made of dangerous carbon fiber. They all hung on the inside of the cabinet doors untouched for more than five years. The shelves and drawers were full of reels, lines, hooks, lures, floats, and counterweights. Neatly folded rested his wading suit, and next to it, his fishing vest and rod bag.

He spent hours contemplating his fishing gear and looking over and over at his misshapen hands. He recalled in his mind a scene that he had been told about, but which he had not lived despite having been the main protagonist.

He remembered the gray day and the overcast sky. He remembered the cold current against his legs in the water. He remembered scolding the children splashing in the river and the loving embrace of his daughter. He remembered having her clinging to his waist as he cast the line. That was all he remembered. The rest was someone else's story, not his.

He woke up four days later, sedated in the hospital. He had had to undergo surgery twice to correct the coagulative necrosis of his body tissues, particularly in his hands. They had feared they would have to amputate them, but he had still lost two fingers.

When he lifted the rod to cast it, he had suffered a powerful electric shock. He hadn't realized that he was near some high-tension wires, or that a thunderstorm was churning in the sky, or that he was holding a highly conductive carbon fiber rod in his hands, or that he was in the middle of the river with his daughter, or that on days like that he should have kept his rod pointed towards the water and as low as possible.

According to what he had been told, the line had not touched the wires, but an electric arc had formed with the high-voltage line, facilitated by the ambient static electricity and the high humidity in the air. The discharge produced had been of such virulence that his daughter had been thrown into the air and had fallen fulminated in the middle of the river. He himself had suffered a violent convulsion throughout his body that had left him unconscious submerged face down in the water among the reeds.

His wife, along with his mother, had seen it all from a distance. They ran in desperation, running into the river as far as where it covered them above the waist. Mary was able to grab his foot and drag his stiffened body to shore. She let her mother-in-law pull him out of the water while she threw herself back into the river in desperate search of her daughter. She wept as she swam, for what seemed an infinite amount of time, until she finally realized that she had lost her daughter.

Shortly before sunset, emergency crews found the lifeless girl two miles downstream, in a muddy area of the river, swept away by the current. She had not drowned when she became unconscious. There was no water in her lungs, they said. The electric shock had ended her life instantly. Sad consolation.

None of this was part of his memory. Simon only remembered the white hospital sheets, the doctors arguing and the pain. First, the pain from his wounds and burns. Then, when they told him what had happened, the immense and incurable pain of having killed his daughter.

The pain would never go away, it was already an inseparable part of his life.

He could not be at the funeral. He could not say goodbye to his little girl. He could not accompany Mary in her own grief, nor could he wipe away her tears. They could not talk about their daughter. He could not look his wife in the face. He could not bear the sadness in his own mother's face. He could not forgive himself. There were so many things he could no longer do!

No one wanted to cry so as not to stir up the sorrowful feelings of those they loved. It was a mourning without tears. An abyss of contained rage. A fire of unspoken laments. A river of turbulent passions beneath a calm surface.

 When he did not regain the mobility of his hands, to promote recovery, the internal scars had to be broken in order to get his new synthetic joints to flex and move. More pain, endless, impossible to heal.

"It wasn't your fault," family and friends told him when they visited him. "It was just an accident."

His ears were seared by those repulsive words. They thought they were putting a kind dressing on him when in reality they were digging deeper into the wound.

He dreamed a thousand times of the instant of the electric shock, a moment he had never experienced. He placed the scene in a scenario that was well known to him, but each time he imagined it, the event changed in his mind. At first imperceptibly, then more drastically, as in a sequence in which the actors had been changed. Now he was no longer the protagonist, but a girl he loved more than himself and a man who must have died in her place.

"You have to get over it. Life goes on. It's not your fault," those damned phrases tortured him to madness.

Far worse were others.

"You're bearing it very well. I couldn't be as calm as you," those words made him feel that he had no conscience, that he had never had one, and that was quite unbearable.

He took refuge in the silence, like a river of calm waters in which the murmur of the current's passage is hardly heard. But still waters are always deep.

The discharge had entered through his right arm, with which he held the rod, and, so he was told, had traveled through his chest and exited through his left arm. His right hand was shattered and his chest burned, but on his left hand he only had significant burns on his index finger. Where had all the current gone? That was the question that tortured him.

He liked to fish alone. When other fishermen accompanied him, he would ask them to move away. If they insisted on fishing with him, he explained that fishing was his moment of intimate solitude, his time of escape. His mystical moment in which he needed to feel alone the quiet flow of life.

That is why that fateful day hurt him so much. A thousand times he could have suffered that damned shock when he was alone. A thousand times he had foolishly knocked at the gates of heaven or perhaps hell. Why that day? Why in that very brief instant, when his daughter had clung to his waist with the most affectionate of embraces?

He could not get the thought that tormented him out of his mind. His daughter's love had saved his life.

By having her clinging to his waist, she had received the brutal impact of the electric shock. Most of the current had passed from his body to hers, throwing her into the air and instantly taking her life. That had saved his life, at the cost of hers.

No one had told him that was what had actually happened. Even if they thought it, no one would dare even hint at it. But he knew that was the heartbreaking truth. And Mary, unconsciously, knew it too. That's why she was always angry, nagging him. It was her resentful way of reproaching him for the death of her daughter, of unconsciously punishing him.

"You have to get over it. You have to get over it," he hated hearing that damned phrase over and over again.

Get over what? Some things can never be overcome, he told himself in exasperation. There is no force in the world powerful enough to repair a shattered soul. Some beings break forever, just like childhood dolls, and no matter how much you loved them, you have no choice but to throw them away.

"You have to get over it," for the first time it was Mary who said it to him as if it were an unexpected declaration of peace.

It caught him by surprise. She must have sensed that he was in a very bad way. Maybe she also had regrets of her own.

"You should go fishing," she told him. "It would be a way to get over it, to turn the page."

Simon didn't say a word, just nodded, but inside he was terrified.

He took his large tackle box out of the closet and filled it thoroughly. What took the most time was choosing lures. He filled his rod bag, though he purposely left out the carbon fiber rods. He grabbed his fishing vest, his landing net, his catch bucket, and his folding chair, and carefully placed everything on his fishing trolley.

Early Saturday morning he loaded all the fishing gear into the car and they drove to his river, where he used to always fish. When they arrived, he spun around a thousand times, lost, before daring to put the trolley down and drag it painfully on its two wheels across the trail.

"I think we should go to the place of the accident," said Mary suddenly. "Our best therapy must be to face that place."

Simon's hands were shaking. He kept dragging the trolley. He stumbled over every stone and got tangled in every weed. He felt painful throbbing in his chest and cramps in his hands. His feet were leaden.

At last, they reached the terrifying place. He almost didn't recognize it. The waters were coming much higher than he remembered. When he looked at the reeds he knew exactly where the discharge had hit him and where his daughter had died. He was petrified. The place was now unbearably familiar.

"Aren't you going to take out the fishing gear?" asked his wife.

Simon understood her words but was unable to move. His eyes were fixed on the fateful spot on the river. His contracted face was growing paler and paler. It was as if he had seen a ghost, the very angel of death. His heart was in his mouth. Suddenly he turned around and with long strides disappeared running through the brush.

Half an hour later she found him in the car, sitting in the passenger seat, trembling and staring blankly. He didn't say a word to her, neither did she. She put the fishing trolley in the trunk and drove home.

He meticulously put all the fishing gear back in his tidy closet. There were no words, no reproaches, no explanations, only glances. Elusive and restless his, sorrowful to the point of dismay, hers.

Simon went the whole of the following week almost without saying a word. He cleaned the window panes mechanically, trying hard not to leave the slightest mark. She no longer scolded or corrected him. She knew that the pain was so deep that a simple tear, a word or a look could cause an inextinguishable fire.

He tried to do everything with the utmost care, paying attention to every detail, as if he knew that any carelessness on his part could again be fatal. Those were enervating and endless days.

The following Saturday Simon got up at dawn. He quietly loaded his tackle box, his rod bag, and his folding fishing trolley. He got into the car and, without waking Mary, drove by himself to the river, right to the site of the accident.

On the shore, he left the trolley with the fishing tackle without even unpacking it and put his feet in the water. He looked for a long time at the reeds where, he thought, he must have died five years ago. It was again a moment of mystical solitude, like those of the past, but now in a very different sense. He no longer felt any fear.

He began to walk slowly, entering the river little by little. One step after another without stopping. There was peace on his face. He knew very well that the still waters ran deep, as deep as his pain, and he was heading towards them.

Dave Hangman is Spanish writer David Verdugo's pseudonym. He has published short stories in the anthologies "Superstition" by Redwood Press and "Cryptids from the Rock" by Engen Books, and in The Brussels Review, Penumbric, Creepy Podcast, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Philosophy Now!, Rock and a Hard Place Magazine, After Dinner Conversation, The Lorelei Signal, East of the Web, Space and Time Magazine, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, The Dirty Spoon, Hyphen Punk, Havok, The Sprawl Mag, History Through Fiction, Tales from the Moonlit Path, and Bright Flash Literary Review. His story "Eternal Fall" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022. He has received four honorable mentions in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contests.