Walt by Ian Stoba

I
    W alt leaned out over the gunnel of his boat and reached into the water. His hand wrapped around the wet hemp line and began to pull.
    Fishing for lobsters, called crawfish by the locals, has been a way of life on Tristan de Cunha for hundreds of years. Walt’s family had been fishing these selfsame waters for seven generations.
    Pulling up a lobster trap was not a new thing for Walt.
    After loading his day’s catch onto his narrow wooden boat, Walt rowed to the dock of the Processing Plant. The Plant was the center of industry on the tiny island, the place to which all crawfish were brought. There they were scientifically killed and their tails were removed and preserved by means of deep freezing for their long journeys to the restaurants and dining tables of the world.
    Walt himself had never tasted lobster. As far as he knew, not one individual in the seven generations of Tristanian lobster fishermen in Walt’s family had ever tasted a lobster. Curiously, he had never even wondered what a crawfish tail might taste like. This was just as well for him as no one on the island, not even the foreman of the Plant, who had been brought from England, could afford to buy a lobster.
    Just as curiously, I myself had never tasted lobster at that point, and in fact still never have. Although, as may be seen by and by, my reasons were, and are, altogether different from Walt’s.
    Only one small item interrupted Walt’s afternoon, one point of malaise intruded into his brain: for the third straight day now Walt had been hearing music in his head. The same song had been playing nonstop inside his skull, closer in than his ears somehow, as if he was not really hearing it but somehow feeling it vibrate in his jaws and cheekbones.
    Walt was becoming just the slightest bit concerned. He had had difficulty sleeping last night because of this strange music, so unlike anything played on Tristan, that played nonstop inside his head. The sound was metallic and thin. He was aware of a voice but could not hear the words. What he perceived most clearly was the sound of an electric guitar, one played in a manner he had never heard before. The sound was odd, drifting into atonality in bits and often seeming a little off, yet still fitting somehow.
    Walt had never been particularly curious or imaginative. Perhaps if he had, he would have paid more attention to this strange music, and he might even have wondered what was causing it. As it was, his fisherman’s interest was only in finding out what piece of music it was, since he was certain that he could not have made it up. Walt was not a composer, he was a fisherman.
    Having rid himself of the day’s catch at the Plant, Walt resolved to go see Mrs. Wilkins, the island’s only piano teacher. Walt of course had never studied music; his family considered him far too simple-minded for such things. Walt’s only real tie to Mrs. Wilkins was that he had once courted her daughter Leonore. Leonore worked in Tristan’s other great industry: postage stamps. Tristanian stamps are valued by collectors all over the world for their beauty and rarity.
    As with most means of employment, the reality of the Tristanian Postal Service, Philatelic Bureau, was not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Leonore was one of four women who licked each beautiful stamp, stuck it to a first day card, canceled the stamp by hand with an ancient postal implement, and finally sent it on its way over the ocean to a stranger eager for the rare and beautiful stamp.
    In retrospect, Walt’s courtship now seemed to him doomed from the beginning. He and Leonore had little in common but hormones, and did not even really enjoy each other’s company very much. It was an extremely rare burst of imagination on Walt’s part which brought them together at all. Entirely out of character, and all by himself, he had imagined that women who licked things for a living might have mysterious erotic powers. The idea took hold of him until he could