The brush smudged a line below the noontime sun and added a splash of blue to the day. The painter's hand skirted over the horizon and paused above foreground walkway, where the boy should be standing. A straw hat, rolled-up pants and freckles would have allowed the youth to exist in this scene, but the boy, wearing a faded and torn jean jacket, a dirty, red ball cap pressed down by headphones, his shoes untied, pants falling down, this boy would need to be overlooked in the townscape.

The artist squinted above his bifocals and adjusted his eyes to the quiet village across the harbour. The boutiques shone in the distance, red and yellow and blue. The polished brass and varnished cedar of a recently restored racing sloop reflected on the green water of the bay. The quiet town glistened. Above, the bell hung motionless in the church steeple. It was Easter.

A group of fisherman formed a line along the harbour wall, taking advantage of a summer sun in April. Six rods, synchronized with one another, followed the slow pulse of the current, each anxiously awaiting a break in the rhythm of the river. The rainbow trout had started their spawning run early this year, one angler was saying.

"Ya, they're up as far as the bridge on the Twelfth Line". Larry knew all there was to know about the spawning habits of the rainbow trout. He was, after all, a life-long resident of the quaint village and a member in good standing of the local legion hall for the past thirty years. "It's 'cuz of the warm spring, you know."

Larry paused to search for a lighter, hidden in the breast pocket of his red plaid shirt. The incense of burning tobacco rose above the river. "Up at Ron's place on the Eighth Line they're packed in there so thick you can walk across the river on their backs." He coughed a laugh.

"Ya?"

Larry's new companion had arrived to take a place along the river wall. He glanced across the river at the town waterfront, then turned to Larry. "Any luck?"

A gull passed overhead, its shadow slicing the years between the two men. The young man looked at the wrinkles beneath Larry's stained lips. The old man cleared his throat of phlegm. "Na, Not a bite."

In the silence that followed, Larry turned and poked short glances at the newcomer. The young man looked like the typical fisherman from the city: neoprene waders, name-brand fishing vest—complete with black and orange floats hanging from a pocket—and an approvable cap hiding his collar-length hair. Larry's eyes caught the young man's fishing rod.

"That's quite a pole ya got there. Is that one of those new space-aged rods I seen in the fishing magazines?"

"Ya. Just got it.  One hundred percent boron graphite blank. Never fished with anything this sensitive before. "

Larry moved two steps down the wall, allowing the younger fisherman to have access to the river. The newcomer lifted the bail across his reel and with one eye closed in concentration, threw his bait into the slow current. A splash received his sinker. The line sank evenly between the young man's two neighbours, and joined the slow sway of the black rods. The young man breathed a long sigh.

The painter saw Larry move toward the young man. They were laughing together now, but their sounds were buried beneath the clamour of a passing truck, laden with rocks for the government project to beautify the harbour. The artist steadied his hand and applied a glint of white to a distant pair of sunglasses. Beneath them, a young woman, in her twenties, lay, head stretched back, to accept the sun. Her flesh, a winter white, reached across a blanket from under her T-shirt and shorts.

"Now that's a pretty one."

"Pardon?"

"I said, that's a pretty one—the girl."

A middle-aged man, clean shaven and hair pasted into style, nonchalantly turned his head.

"Yes, I know. She's my wife."

"Well, you're a lucky man, my friend." The admirer realigned his baseball cap and rubbed his fiery red beard. Randy, a mechanic and auto-body restorer who had won awards for his trucks at the fall fair, was known to have a keen eye for beauty. The mechanic placed a hand on the bare stomach overhanging his belt and returned his stare to the float.

"You've got to get them young, that's the secret," the first man was saying. He didn't appear to be from town: his head moved with a quick jerk, his ear twitched when he spoke. Perhaps he was a businessman from the city. "My first wife—well, she got too old for me. Once they get rolls and wrinkles, it's time to trade them in." His laugh echoed through the tunnel of the bridge pilings.

The men snorted a laugh, reeled their lines in unison and cast upstream.

"You from around here?" the red-haired mechanic asked.

"Not really. I got a condo down the shore. Beautiful place—brand new, with a pool, tennis courts, backs onto the new golf course. I just come up here on weekends to get away from the city and to do a little fishing. I love the clean air and the beautiful water up here, you know?"

"Yup. It doesn't get much better than this—except maybe for a fish or two."

Both men watched their lines. Randy the mechanic scratched a crimson rash on his bare belly, the other man picked a wart on his thumb. Both men waited expectantly for some sign of hope. 

The visitor from the city broke the silence. "There's nothing I'd rather see right now than a nice five-pound rainbow trout beside me. The colours are so beautiful on the ones heading up river this time of year."

"Yup. That's why I'm here. I just love these fish. So sleek, and that bright red stripe on them—especially the males."

The men nodded in agreement, and one after the other, each reeled in his line to change to his bait to a fresh piece of trout roe.

An orange smudge, hardly a beard, completed the artist's capture of the fishermen. Standing a few feet back, squinting his eyes and not looking too closely, the painter saw the speckles of colour melt into the harbour town. He looked up at the village: a man sweeping the sidewalk; another painter—this one in overalls—high on a ladder, covering a frost-ripped trim with pink; a lady and a floral dress, planting plastic tulips in a window box. This, the artist knew, was a normal town. Normal and ordinary, like a million other places he had never seen. The painting will sell, he told himself.

The painter saw the Johnson twins skipping rocks on the river surface just above the bridge. He could see through the silence: their arms snapping at the wrists, spurts of water jumping from the river, boys leaping from rock to rock. The two boys, with their trimmed hair and identical plaid shirts, reminded the artist of the boy's father. The twins would grow up and marry nice local girls, he chuckled to himself. If he were around in twenty years, he would probably be painting the Johnson twins fishing on an Easter afternoon.

The Johnson twins saw it first.

The slow flow of the river, always constant, for an instant, changed. A ring, little more than a ripple, appeared on the surface. It was the sign of something greater beneath. From the mud green depths, a shadow appeared; a dark boil stretching the river's skin from the inside. Slowly a rounded point broke the barrier.

The Johnsons jumped along the boulders upstream to get a closer look. The shape disappeared. The ring of ripples trickled away in the current. Then, they saw it again—closer this time. It would have looked to the Johnson twins as though a large, rounded piece of driftwood was slowly bobbing towards the lake. But they could sense life in the wood. Arms swinging and heads turning, the boys raised the alarm that a fish, a prize catch, was just beyond their reach.

The red-bearded mechanic broke from the line of anglers and jogged to where the boys were pointing, just upstream of the bridge. He stood next to the twins and aimed his rod to the circle of ripples that had been the trout.

The fish raised its glorious head into the sunlight.

"There it is!" the twins cried.

The fisherman gasped in amazement. Then the fish disappeared.

"Oh my—did you see the size of that guy?"

"He must be twelve pounds!" one of the twins said.

"No, he's at least fifteen," argued the other.

"No way, he's not that big. Thirteen, maybe."

While the twins continued to argue, the fish broke the surface again. The mechanic cast into the ring of waves.

As the threesome theorized about how a fish could get so large, they hopped from boulder to boulder, following their prize downstream to the group of awaiting anglers. A crowd had formed below the bridge, each man anxious to catch a glimpse of the trophy trout.

But when the fish lifted her head again to her admirers, she revealed her terrible beauty. The men, unaccustomed to such ugliness, saw the rotting flesh, curled in grey fungus, clinging to a near-dead skull; shreds of skin were tied together with twisted membranes. The fish head was dangling above the surface, dragging in the current. Her mouth was gasping the poisonous air. In the gleam of her eye was life.

"Oh, gross!"

"That's disgusting. I drive all the way up from the city to try and catch a clean fish, but all I get to look at is this stinking thing. I think I'm gonna be sick."

The fishermen's nostrils stung with the odour of rotting fish. Larry's face squirmed as a noxious belch rose in his throat. He lit a cigarette.

"Wow. I've seen fish banged up from spawning before, but nothing this ugly. I don't even think this here is a trout."

"I'd think he was dead, just floating there, but his eyes are moving," one fisherman said.

Another corrected him: "It's a female."

"Oh, gross."

The mechanic with the red beard tried to ignore the scent in the air and moved farther downstream to continue fishing. The visitor from the city gathered his net and his sunbathing wife and ran to the safety of his car, and soon, his condominium.

Huddled together at the river's edge, the men decided what must be done. One angler pointed out that the monstrous fish made the town look bad: fishermen might think the river was contaminated. Another angler was concerned that the fish was diseased and unless something was done immediately, the horrible disease would spread to the other fish.

"And what if this thing should reproduce?" was the closing argument. "We can't allow that."

It was decided. In the interest of public safety, protection of the environment and the town's aesthetics, the fish must die.

As the late afternoon sun flashed its brilliance into the boutique windows and was reflected as gold upon the green water, the fishermen, poles leaning on the trimmed cedar hedge, peered down the concrete break-wall at the floating fish. The young angler in the green vest volunteered to sacrifice his new landing net to capture the creature. He knelt on one knee at the wall and lowered the nylon net into the river. The paralyzed trout, a foot from the net, let herself drift into the mesh without a fight. Above, a circle of men and boys gazed, and above them, the gulls circled, squawking in anticipation; below, the eyes of a solitary fish shone against the water. The net twisted, then lifted. The fish thudded on the dead concrete.

Larry coughed something from his throat. The young angler checked to see that his new net wasn't damaged. The red-bearded mechanic scratched the rash on his stomach. The Johnson twins held their noses. No one spoke as they gasped at the contorted monstrosity at their feet.

The trout was a withering curl of bone. Her spine was twisted in a broken arch. The deformed body, speckled with patchy growths of festering fungus, was almost doubled upon itself, head and tail all but joined. Against the straight lines of the concrete walkway, she formed an omega. Her lungs rose with each breath. Her belly sagged from the emptiness that two days ago held her eggs. Her eyes glistened.

"Nature sure can be ugly sometimes." A rubber boot kicked the fish, sending it skidding across the concrete.

"I don't know how it ever made it upriver to spawn. Must have been quite a struggle with its back all crooked like that. It's scary."

"And, if it did lay its eggs, that means these freak fish are going to take over, keep coming back every year to spawn. They'll bring more disease to our river."

"I've never seen anything so disgusting in my life," the mechanic scoffed as he nailed the fish with another kick.

"It's some abnormal deformation," Larry said. "I read about it in a medical book." He inhaled the smoke from his cigarette and unsheathed his fishing knife. "Look, it's still alive."

Kneeling, the old fisherman poked the arched back with the blade of his knife. The speckled skin curled a wrinkle. He threw his half-finished cigarette into the river, raised his hand high above him, paused, and drove the knife deep into the fish's side. The fish's eyes flickered and her body flinched, then was still.

The painter slammed closed the trunk of his car, palette, easel and paint locked inside. He squinted for the keyhole and stabbed his key into the door lock. He could put the finishing touches on the painting when he got home. Tomorrow, maybe, he would sign the finished canvas and hoped that he would be able to bring it to the gallery before the weekend, when the tourists and cottagers would be up looking to decorate their condos and beach houses. He could probably knock off three or four of these now, maybe have them done by next week too, in case the first one sells quickly.

As the artist's car engine turned over, he digested one final glance at the lines and colours of the town he loved. He saw the slow procession of fishermen along the river's edge, the black, crooked body of a fish, borne upon two broken branches, flung into a yellow garbage can. In the barrel marked 'Keep Your Town Beautiful,'  among greasy hamburger wrappers and coffee cups lay the crooked fish.