Read the 2022 Devon Prize Winner - The Fisherman's Wife by Marta Emmitt
The Fisherman's Wife by Marta Emmitt First time they lay together he cried. He never did again, but that first time, he cried into the crook of her neck, like a little boy. “What is it?” she asked him. “It’s me,” he said. “I’m all wrong.” She stroked his hair. He looked up at her with his big wide eyes. “Do you think,” he said, “we’ll have sons?” She laughed then. “Not too soon, I hope,” she said, “and you can’t choose what you get.” “I never knew my father,” he said, curling back down so his head rested on her belly. “He was a fisherman, like me. Left when I was a baby. All’s I remember is a whiskery face, and a smell of fish.” He stroked the soft round shape of her, until she shivered. “I want my sons to know me,” he said. She knew when she got the phone call. Shouldn’t have let him out on the boat, at his age. There had never been any stopping him, though. Fishing was his life, he said, and nothing would change that. It was work, and even