It’s been a very similar routine as of late.
Wake up, forage or hunt for something to eat, get back home, and go to sleep. Hellen understands it’s been like this for years, but for some reason he has only begun to realize the weight of it now. His head feels foggy, more than anything.
He had gotten up this morning, yet again not feeling very rested, and thought, “Fishing may be a nice change of pace.”
So, here he is. He casts a line into the lake.
Sunlight glimmers off the peaks of the rippling water, the lure bobs, and he watches.
Today is windy and cool, which he can both hear in the trees and feel with a light, bracing breeze on his face. He takes a moment to adjust his scarf before he places his hand back on the fishing rod and waits.
Not that Hellen has ever been particularly good at fishing, or particularly interested in it for that matter, but he traded with a shopkeeper to get this fishing rod years ago. It’s a good implement to have on hand. It would be a waste if he didn’t even attempt to use it every so often, and, of course, he needs something to distract himself with. It may as well be fishing, because—two birds with one stone—he’ll get food at the same time.
He recalls one of the earliest times he went out to the forest to hunt, as a child, with nothing but a slingshot and some rocks. Much of the time was spent getting distracted and shooting at trees, but he eventually did come back home with something. He had shot a bird—a shock to his big sister initially, though she’d get over it quickly and help cook it that night. Food is food.
Something tugs on the line.
Hellen reels it in quickly and, surely enough, there is a fish caught on the end. It flails and flicks water on him.
Quite a small one, he thinks, though that shouldn’t be too much of an issue if he can catch more. He casts the line again, and then again.
At some point he starts to wonder if he can sit down while fishing or if that would be counterproductive, but by the time the sky has turned a pleasant shade of orange, he finds himself having caught enough to prepare a decent dinner.
He reels his line back for the last time, packs everything up, and starts to walk home.
Thankfully, the walk is largely uneventful, which is how a walk home should be. Nothing attacks him—a considerable relief. At some point the slipknot in one strap of his backpack comes loose and that side keeps slipping off his shoulder, but that’s only mildly irritating, and he gets back to his house just fine.
Upon opening the front door, the difference in air quality hits him immediately. Just through the threshold of the doorway, he can tell how much stuffier it is inside. A part of him wants to stay out and watch the sunset over the lake, get some more fresh air, but he recognizes it as unreasonable. It would be dangerous to stay out that late.
He steps inside, sets his backpack on the floor, and shuts the door.
After a short break to rest, so begins the process of getting the fish ready to eat.
He rinses them, removes their heads, thinks about how he could save the heads and bones to make a broth of some sort, starts debating whether it would go bad before he could figure out how to do anything with it, and then somehow ends up not doing it at all—the usual process for cleaning a catch.
At some point his eye itches, and he narrowly refrains from accidentally scratching it while his hands are still covered in raw fish.
So it goes, he cooks and eats, and it’s an okay meal. It could have used more seasoning, he thinks, but he can’t exactly be picky. He sits and wonders about what to do with the scraps, now, feeling as though it’s a waste to just toss them outside.
Would a houseplant like fish scraps as fertilizer? Surely, composting them into fertilizer wouldn’t be too difficult. Then again, he isn’t sure if scraps from a couple of small fish would be enough to make anything significant. Turning it into a liquid fertilizer would be a lengthy process that he isn’t sure he’s willing to start for such a small amount of scraps.
Perhaps he should start fishing more often and gather more scraps. Then again (yet again), he would still need to figure out what to do with the scraps that he currently has. Keeping them in the house while they decompose is absolutely not an option. Maybe they would be effective if he ground them into a paste of some kind and spread it into the potted dirt. Would that not smell just as bad though? Maybe the odor is nullified when it’s in the soil.
He hasn’t used anything as fertilizer before. Maybe fertilizer would be detrimental to a carnivorous plant, because it already gets what it needs from the insects it consumes and wouldn’t be used to getting anything more.
Hellen is standing in front of his pitcher plant. He blinks.
At some point, he must’ve gotten up. There’s a jug of rainwater from the cupboard in his hands.
May as well water the plant, then.
The tendrils are like intertwined strands of green and off-white, the pitchers start off a shade of mahogany then fade into yellow, and the leaves are curved and slightly glossy. It’s a pleasant looking plant.
He uncaps the jug and starts pouring it over the soil.
It’s a big plant, too, having grown considerably in the years he’s kept it. He remembers it used to be quite a bit smaller, contained to its pot, but now the pitchers threaten to droop over the edge. Light, curling roots have begun sprouting out from the dirt, which means he should probably repot soon, though he isn’t sure where he’d get a more suitably sized holder for it. It was easier to take care of a plant when he was still in the general vicinity of a shop, it turns out.
A small pool of water peeks out from under the pot. That’s his cue to stop pouring.
He goes to put the jug back in the cupboard and, on the way, looks out the window. The sky is dark now, cloudy, and the trees are swaying slower. It’s getting late. He would quite like to lay down and fall asleep right there, though he refrains for long enough to toss the fish scraps, clean his hands, and set up a proper bed for himself.
He drifts off rather easily after that.