Everything I Found on the Beach Read Online Free

Grzegorz almost choked with this cloth of thanks that seemed to cough up out of him from somewhere. He was filled with this great sense that they would make it, that they would get through all of this and be happy soon. That this was just a stop on the way. He reached for his wife’s hand and held it, and for a moment just in this small gesture there was all this renewed hope.
    One of the older women handed a plate to his wife and there was something almost religious about the act, as if of some great donation. She looked down at the duck offal.
    â€œIt’ll keep you strong,” said the woman. Grzegorz saw the great pride in the woman’s face.
    The wave of hope broke and smashed over the stones of the facts. “I’m still in Poland,” thought Grzegorz. Again, the boat of his emotions tipped in the waves. “We can’t move on while there is all of this, we can’t become anything new.” He looked at all the Polish products around the place, sitting in the cooking smells, the familiarity of the sounds. He looked desperately out of the window at the wall opposite with the big graffiti, “Polish out,” but he didn’t register it any more. He wanted to feel better at this incredible time.
    â€œThis is where we are now,” he thought. “And we have to move on. Here. Poland has nothing for us.” He wanted so much to change things and to bring all these new things to his life. He was very desperate for that. “I just need a chance,” he thought. He watched his wife eat up the small offal with her fingers, holding their tiny new son. Someone needs to give me a chance.

    As he headed back in, Hold took five or six of the fish and laid them on the gunwale. They were medium-sized fish and he held them down on the gunwale and descaled them with the back of the knife, working in little jerking strokes. Then he moved the descaled fish to a board on the gunwale and took off the flesh, working from the head down along the spine then slipping out the rib bones from the severed flanks and putting the fillets into a box. It was a rhythmic and calm process and he moved easily with the boat as it headed in and he could feel the course of the boat just with his body. He had taken bass and codling in the net and it was the bass he filleted.
    When he had taken the fillets, he cut out the intestines into a pile. Then he cut off the translucent meat and the flaps of foily skin and cut the heads from the thick spines and threw all of that into one of the bait tubs for the pots. The bass had big heads for their size and this was good bait and lasted a long time in the potsin the water. He did this with a kind of mechanism and it was part of him to invent little rituals and to give himself small lectures.
    Above him, a string of gulls had come on, and he flicked off the rich pile of intestines from the gunwale and the gulls dropped into the water after the sinking guts. In amongst the bright-white adults, some of the gulls still had the juvenile plumage they would have until some summers further on. Hold had noticed how the younger gulls had rich brown eyes, with something almost mammalian in them, but that the older gulls’ eyes were cold, yellow, as if something had gone out of them. Some of the adult gulls were so close he could see clearly the red spot on their beak that the chicks would tap to make them regurgitate food, and while he did not care for the yellow eyes, he liked this mechanism in them.
    He hauled a bucket of water and washed the scales and the rust-like blood down off the gunwale and cleaned the cutting board and his knife then washed the blood and scales off his hands with the seawater, which was the best way. He could feel a chop starting in the sea that would mean the weather getting up in the next few days, the sea here filling with the beginnings of an energy nascent hundreds of miles away. Some Bahamian storm or seeming emotional reaction to change in