If you are still doing prompts, how about Christopher Foyle and R. (By the water)?
This is really lovely, and I am sorry that it has taken me so long to get to it!
Christopher Foyle does not touch his tools. Rod and tackle sit neglected on the bank, and the chestnut tree rustles above him. It has always seemed to him a grace and a graceful thing to him, the silence of the fishermanās waiting. The contemplative manās recreation, worthy of both love and practice.Ā
Sometimes, he feels that it is an art almost entirely passive, when it comes to the river. All battles with the trout have been fought beforehand, in the evenings, by a crackling fire, with the use of fine thread and feathers. He sometimes thinks that the hours by the riverside only prove the worth of the hours at a scarred table, mind and eyes and fingertips together binding a fly that will touch the surface of the water and seem instantly a part of the nature that surrounds it.
Sometimes, he feels that it is a craft that demands his entire focus, his entire body, his entire mind. Even before the moment when the surface ripples, and the line tugs at the rod, he must hold himself in readiness. Sometimes he feels that this is what binds him to the earth: the awareness of his feet against the earth, his hands on the rod becoming an awareness also of the chestnut tree, of the river itself.
Few are the people who have shared this silence with him. Rosalind, in the days of their courtship. Andrew, Andrew noisy and jubilant, spoiling the fishing; Andrew earnest, and eager, and half-sullen. Of late, Captain Kieffer, who insists on being John, and who loves the river, for all his fancy rods. Christopher Foyle sighs. It is all too easy to consider how many dead bodies time has piled up at the gates of death. But somehow, in the silence of a world unexpectedly at peace, it seems quite enough to study to be quiet.
