Larry Flynn’s “Catch & Release,” a runner-up in the 2024 Reprint Prize, takes its time, moving the reader between past and present, memory and action. This is both a love letter and a farewell to the narrator’s mother, but also a signal to his future. This story never takes us physically far from the hospital room, but still moves the reader deeply into grief.
“Catch & Release” was first published in West Branch.
Back when we lived on the Chippewa Flowage in a camper just big enough to house us and two malamutes—except, there wasn’t really any room for the malamutes no matter how skinny they were, but Dad said we were getting two malamutes so it meant we were getting two malamutes—back in those days, we lived in a camper that could barely drive up our hill, especially when it snowed in the winter which, in northern Wisconsin, is like ten months of the year and I often found myself outside my body and feeling so tiny and so cold and I howled with the malamutes and felt comforted to speak in a language other than my own.
Back then, we hunted ruffed grouse—not for sport like the people from downtown Hayward who jet skied on our flowage in the summers, but because there was an open mouth you and Dad had to feed and I felt guilty for holding it open even though it was natural for me to hold it open and I am still to this day sorry, Mom, that I had to eat from your mouth.
Back then, I watched Dad leave the house in his camo suit and red hat (which defeated the point of the camo, didn’t it?) and followed the waves of your knitting needles as you crafted sweaters for me and the malamutes and Alan, even though Alan had been dead for years and years and years, and I loved your sweaters and wore the ones you made for Alan because they were soft and taut, and it felt like someone was hugging me.
Back then, we sang Polish lullabies and read Dr. Seuss and sometimes, in my memories, Alan is in the trailer and he is with us and, in my memories, his eyes are bloodshot and empty and I am chanting Hop on Pop! Hop on Pop! but he is not chanting with me and no one is hopping on Pop and everyone is looking at me as if there is a secret I do not know and maybe, when I think about it, no one sang Polish lullabies and I read those books to myself and everyone else was hunting what people hunt on the Chippewa Flowage between winter and summer solstices: oxy, whisky, and ruffed grouse.
Rotation, rotation, rotation. On the highway from Duluth International, everything looks to be in motion.
You are locked in stasis. I had always thought it was acoma. The doctor told me it was a coma and you were in it, as if Coma were a place or a town or a state.
Googled it. Similar: inertia, collapse, stupor, persistent vegetative state.
A cigarette bud burns on the pavement. The episcopal church has a fresh paint job. A man in a trucker’s hat and a baggy plaid shirt is opening his mailbox. He is building an addition to his house.
Inertia and collapse?
My baby boy is growing, even though I am away. My wife is growing, even though I am away. The Chippewa Greenhouse in Evanston is in business, even though I am away.
You are in inertia. You are in collapse.
My tires are in rotation, rotation, like the wheels of our camper, back, back on those zero-degree days in February, like that day the power ran out in the camper so you drove the ’98 Corolla into town for bread while I buried my face in the malamutes’ fur coat for warmth and peeked up when I heard ice breaking and saw Dad standing above the flowage chugging a bottle of whisky, cracking his knuckles, and diving in and I can’t remember anything except waking up with a cold compress on my forehead in a warm, heated trailer, with you sitting by my side and artificial red and blue lights painting a vision of a night I would cling to even though I did not want to cling to it and I have no choice but to retain the memory (like Dad had no choice but to jump into the lake).
Back then, the smell of lilies at the funeral disturbed my allergies and made my nose run, so I was sneezing throughout Uncle Denny’s brief eulogy and everyone in that room must have been saying things like Poor kid and He’s just a child but I don’t remember anything anyone said except for Uncle Denny whose first words at the podium were, “I’m sorry you’ve been left behind,” and I think he was looking at me.
Back then, I was just old enough to remember Dad’s lessons about fishing—where to buy the worms, what weather conditions led to the most activity, how to cast a line—but I had to be different from Dad in some way in order to preserve myself and my body so I decided to catch and release the fish instead of cooking them for dinner—a decision which meant more trips to Steak ‘n Shake and McDonald’s—which I knew was bad for you and me but was good for the fish and it was important to do good things.
Back then, I thought I could catch and release fish and their lives would go back to normal but that’s before I learned that the average fish has as many nerves as a human toddler and that fish experience trauma in the struggle of being brought into the open air and that catch and release fishing is so traumatic that fish often die immediately after they are released, swimming out into a lake so threatening, so impossibly haunting—but, anyway, my new employee at the greenhouse starts work today.
We needed more hands to work the plants. They are in need of constant watering. They need to be positioned in just the right sunlight.
Yasmine is teaching right now. She is probably reading to her students. She fertilizes and waters and grows first graders. They are in need of constant watering. They need to be positioned in just the right sunlight.
You are in inertia. You are in collapse.
When I sit beside you and hold your hand in my palms, will I be holding onto a corpse? Will I be holding onto you, my mom?
An abandoned silo. A rusting school bus beside it.
Will you feel me walking into the room? Will you feel my hand? Will you know it is my hand? Are you playing music in your head, or listening to yourself think? Do you hear imaginary songbirds or the beeping of machinery?
A billboard: CALL 800-55-TRUTH.
If I sung you a lullaby here, on the highway, could you hear me? Do you hear the voice in my head when I tell you I love you over and over and over again, like I’m praying the rosary?
Are you at peace?
A field of wheat. No wind. Heavy wheat, which is what I saw back when I left Chippewa, and I thought, This is what it must feel like to get high, and I understood why Alan did what he did. I thought of him when I was preparing to leave because he had left too, though we would be leaving on different terms. I put several unworn sweaters in my backpack but left most behind because you would need them too and, when you drove me to Madison for the first time, we sat in the car silently, which I interpreted as confirmation that I was committing a sin by leaving you behind in Chippewa. When we finally arrived at the university with nothing that needed to be unpacked, I was worried you would cry but you didn’t, and it was me who cried that day and that night and that next day and that next night because I knew you were taking that camper right back up to Chippewa to be with the oxy and whiskey and ruffed grouse and, I knew it was only a matter of time before you ended up like Dad too.
Remember getting my phone calls from my dorm room? After only a month, you told me I was talking differently. Remember when I taught you some of the disciplines I was learning? In psychology, I learned about “slow thinking” from Daniel Kahneman and realized that we had always been thinking “fast” to try to make it to the next day. Smart people called it scarcity, but I called it life at home, or Tuesday, or, how is Dad going to get milk and eggs with $2.50 in change, and it was weird to hear people talk about my life in the abstract or passive voice: “Some people cannot think about long-term planning,” and, “Not everyone is able to…” and, the best one, “There exist people who…” I took up writing to pin myself down, to become something embodied.
Mom—I don’t think I ever told you this, but I remember a workshop peer at a creative writing course at Madison who told me my memoir sounded like a rags-to-riches story but I broke the workshop silence to say, That would imply that I have riches now, so she said, Well, don’t you, and I said, Well if I have riches now then I always had riches (which wasn’t true, but I said it because that felt like something someone in a movie would say) and the teacher said, Let’s not break the workshop silence, Eli, and my classmate said, That’s beautiful, Eli, and looked at me with this goddamn grin, knowing I was one of the good ones who could appreciate my own poverty (or some bullshit) and, after the workshop, I realized we had seen that look many times: In the basement of the Episcopal church in Hayward from all the church-going, Jesus-loving, pearl-clutching ladies who gifted me a can of black bean soup and told me to stay warm out there, champ; in the grocery checkout when I handed a slip of paper to the cashier upside down so no one could read U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Coupon, and the cashier reached into his own pocket to buy my bottle of whiskey and I said, You don’t understand, I want to pay for this, and he said, Oh I’m sure you do, but I’m not letting the taxpayer pay for your whiskey and I said, It’s for my father and he said, It’s not for your father and he looked at me with that look—that goddamn look—but this time it was sarcastic because he knew our secret, that we were not one of the good ones and that we have never appreciated our own poverty (or some bullshit).
A sign: Entering Chippewa. The flowage. Beyond a row of trees. Westward.
A reminder: I hire people now. I own. I provide.
An unused hunting blind. A field of wheat. Some wind.
A reminder: I pay an extra $1.99 to watch the movie in HD. I spend $45 on Saturday brunch with Yasmine. I bought a $59.99 crib made of the finest pine, no matte finish.
Evergreens. More wind. Evergreens don’t move much in the wind.
How much will your bill be? No. It will cost what it costs.
A reminder: I am a husband. I will be a father. I will hold weight on my shoulders.
I turn off the highway. I know directions to this hospital from any direction. I haven’t been to this hospital in years, but maps of Wisconsin backroads are buried inside us. They are our cardio-vascular system.
Remember when you were proud of me—when 2.9 became 3.2, then 3.4, all the way up to 4.0?
Remember when I called you to teach you economic concepts, just for the interest of it? Upward Mobility, Tradeoffs, Purchasing Power.
To us, zero-sum games feel intuitive: either cinnamon raisin bread or bagels, not both; either buy the warmer jacket or stay inside the trailer all winter; either fix the electricity in the trailer or kill yourself. These thoughts are natural and deeply human. And every time I wanted to write, wanted to make sense of the world I put that pen to the side and focused on what mattered: a business degree, a first-class lottery ticket out of this world, a home for you and a home for me. Those MBA applications asked for stories about why business mattered to us, so I remembered what my classmate wanted to hear and wrote to her.
The world loves stories like ours, Mom. They take great comfort in hearing tales of unfamiliar things.
I remember when I had to pitch my business ideas to investors and told these stories and, my God, investors loved hearing about my rags-to-riches, loved hearing how anyone can mold themselves into a success and you should be proud because you are one of the good ones. I smiled at the meetings but, Mom, I hated myself a little more each day.
Remember when I opened Chippewa Greenhouse in Evanston and gave you the tour? Remember when I bought Chip and could actually feed him the proper proportions for a malamute? Remember when I bought a camper for vacations only? Remember when we went into the Northwestern University bookstore and bought ourselves purple sweaters? Remember when I sent you a picture of my new tortoise-rimmed glasses, which I had needed for years? Remember when I finally trimmed my beard and you laughed at how young I looked? Remember when I bought slim-fit shirts and lost a little bit of weight jogging?
Do you still remember?
An ambulance has pulled in front of the hospital. St. Joseph’s Medical Center. I park far away. I want to remain far away.
It smells like a greenhouse outside—and damn if I still don’t love Chippewa just a little bit.
Chippewa’s smell reminds me of its opposite. I remember the time I met Yasmine’s family at their Gold Coast apartment. They said it must be beautiful up there in the woods. They said they loved living on the lake too and pointed to Lake Michigan visible through a bay window and I said my lake looks a little different and they said, “I thought you said it was a lake?”
America loves my story. America loves its stories.
Why did I not die in this hospital too? Why did you happen to slip and fall? Why did economics make sense to me? Why am I not locked in stasis? Am I locked in stasis? Is this persistent vegetative state?
I remember when I stopped in a jewelry store and bought a real diamond for Yasmine. You never had a ring. My children’s mother would have a ring. I remember telling the man behind the desk, “It costs what it costs,” as he swiped my Mastercard. When Yasmine opened the door, I wanted to feel a sense of calm and completion and satisfaction and achievement.
I felt none of these things.
She said yes. I had purchased a normal life. Last week, you said, “You’ve made it, Eli.” But right now the nurse is saying Right this way and art is hanging on the hospital walls and art is a splash of color, like the color of broken memories and broken brains and the room is 210 and the door is teal-blue and I bet the walls are white on the inside.
This morning the doctor told me you hit your head on the countertop. They found your phone in your hand with my number typed on the screen. I asked the doctor what was next and the doctor said there is a one in a thousand chance of coming out of a coma like this and, now, there is beeping somewhere inside of me and outside of me and it’s hard to imagine a body without pores, Mom, but that’s what the heat radiating from my body made me feel and I just wanted to go back, back, back, back, even if it meant I relived the glass in my feet, the day Alan did what he did, the springy camper mattress, the catch and release fishing, the bottles of pills and alcohol everywhere, that look, Dad’s decision (which, again, wasn’t really a decision), and the string of unsuccessful lottery tickets, which could have saved Alan and Dad and you and me, but then again could the lottery have saved Alan and Dad and you? And can the lottery save me? And my God, Mom, is this your body on the hospital bed?
It is your body. But you are not in this room.
You are white and your clothes are white and this is what angels look like and I am glad I have the privilege to witness one alive—or locked in stasis, or locked in inertia, or whatever this is—and back, back when you and I lived on the Chippewa Flowage with each other and the malamutes and no one else, we played cards and backgammon until the moon rose higher than the tops of the pine, spruce, and evergreen and, believe it or not, sometimes we laughed and laughed and, though mine was the only sober laugh, I felt tied to something else, like we all had umbilical cords that a doctor could never detach and you and Dad and Alan and I might always be four corners of a constellation.
Hold my hand, Mom.
It will take a cosmic rupture to disconnect us because back, back when we hunted ruffed grouse, the gunshots would reverberate along Our Flowage and the pop! would scare me every time, even though I knew Dad would never hurt me—only the grouse—but I knew what it was like to be one misstep away from getting mistaken for a deer in the woods, taken down by factory machine metal, dragged from the woods to be locked in a coroner’s gaze, and broadcast in the abstract on the ten o’clock news: LOCAL TEEN MISTAKEN FOR DEER, SHOT.
Late at night, when I am holding Yasmine’s pregnant belly, I hear pop! pop! pop! pop!
Here I am and here you are and we are back, back in the spirit of a time without clocks in the camper which, you said, was a deliberate choice because baby, we have so little control but at least we can control whether we are owned by time or are just gonna let it move along and, my God, I thought you were the wisest human being on the planet and I guess wisdom—much like time—is all relative; and here you are, laying in your hospital gown while the clock ticks, ticks, ticks, ticks and (if it weren’t for money and weren’t for finite hospital space and weren’t for doctors’ strong recommendations via percentages and weren’t for zero-sum-ness) you could live here forever, maybe never needing to die.
You could live and relive and live and relive Chippewa and I could too, and I am falling asleep with your fingers locked into mine like the old days on the flowage and reality fades into a dream:
Baby names. A vision of you in a house with no shoes on.
Eli Junior? Eli II? A vision of the malamutes’ radiant blue eyes.
No, I won’t name him Alan. A vision of pine and spruce.
A new name. Samuel? Dreams of tight sweaters.
Something like a complete thought: If this country has broken Mom, this country can break anyone. Something like a complete thought: Samuel.
Mom. Hear me. You will never meet my child. And I am both sorry and think it is for the best. I can tell him half-truths and we can move on from stasis.
Samuel! Build me a new history.
Samuel! Help me.
Mom: forgive me. I will have to sign the papers.
But I will spend days here by your side. I will rehash every memory with you, even though you cannot hear or respond to any of them. I will wail and the nurses will peek into the room from the hallway to see what’s going on in room 210. I will set the price of your trailer low and affordable so someone else can refashion it.
Did I tell you? I have thought about purchasing solar panels for my greenhouse. I have thought about hiring more new workers this spring. I have plans to bring home a bonsai. I’ll be on the plane going back, back in no time.
Mom: I will order a whiskey from the flight attendant. This whiskey will be different. It will come at elevation.
Mom: I will look down upon the deciduous and carnivorous northern Wisconsin woods. I will blow her, and you, a kiss.
Mom.
From these imagined heights, the malamutes, grouse, campers, and people will be invisible under distant canopies but, when I sip my whiskey, I will hear the faint melody of a lullaby, a pastorale, or a howl someone must have taught me—was it you?—as the volume of the music in my head crescendos and I can no longer discern the song’s words or my own and I will feel embodied in something like a first memory with a grousy-poo and A double rainbow, look! and the sky might be blue-grey—so bright, so liquid!—and new rain might melt me like soft-serve but I am hot, hot, hot like a furnace because, “Yes, Eli, the sun is shining today!” and Weeeee! I am up on someone’s shoulders and taller than a giant—a giant!—and I smell fish that have been caught and released and I am outside my body or part of another body which is melting because of the rain and the sun and I stop saying weeeee! because I am at the mercy of something outside of my body catching me and holding onto me and singing to me and carrying me back, back, carrying me back, back, carrying me.
Larry Flynn is an MFA candidate and teacher at UMass Amherst. His writing has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, West Branch, New Letters, Greensboro Review, StoryQuarterly, The Normal School, and others. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and UMass Amherst’s School of Earth & Sustainability, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and Columbia University’s Teachers College; he has also attended workshops at Tin House and The Kenyon Review. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, listed as a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize, and selected as Honorable Mention for the Cara Paravanni Memorial Award. Read more at LawrenceFlynn.com.