Author: AP Ritchey

Every Sunday Jed and I met up at the catching place—a pond we’d been fishing for years. It wasn’t much to look at. Just a muddy oval tucked back behind a row of cottonwoods, with a leaning dock somebody built long before either of us started coming out there. The water stayed dark even in good sunlight, and most days the fish kept to themselves.
Nobody else seemed to know about it, which suited us fine.
We were halfway through the second 12-pack when the craft appeared over the pond.
It didn’t arrive dramatically. No thunder, no lightning. Just a quiet, deliberate slide out of the clouds until it was hovering over the middle of the water.
I tipped my hat back and squinted up at it.
“Right on time,” I said.
Jed didn’t even look surprised. He just squirmed in his seat a bit.
“Man,” he said, “I’m still sore from last time.”
The craft lowered another twenty feet, humming now—deep enough to rattle the bottles in the cupholders of our collapsible chairs. The surface of the pond started to tremble.
Jed cracked another beer and glanced at the rods.
“You got your drag set right?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Good.”
We watched the water.
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Normally it didn’t take long. Just that steady hum above us and the slow rippling across the middle of the pond.
Then both lines jerked.
Hard.
“Oh hell,” Jed barked.
My reel started screaming.
Whatever had taken the bait was big. Real big. The line carved a hard V across the water as it ran. We dug our boots into the mud and leaned back, laughing and cursing while the rods bowed nearly to breaking. The fight went on long enough to make our arms shake.
Finally the surface exploded and two enormous bass thrashed up onto the bank. Absolute monsters. Wide heads. Thick backs. The kind you only see in magazines.
Trophies, definitely.
Records, maybe.
Jed bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. He looked from the fish to the sky and shook his head.
“Every time.”
The hum above us deepened.
A bright column of light poured down from the underside of the craft.
“Shoot,” I called out. “Get ‘em in the cooler.” Jed grabbed up the fish and dumped them, flapping and angry, into our large cooler, and slammed the lid shut.
“That’ll hold ‘em,” he said, as our boots lifted off the ground.
Jed rose beside me, his beer drifting lazily upward after him. For a moment we just floated there, looking down at the grass, the pond, and the old red cooler beside the tackle box.
The craft continued pulling us upward.
I glanced over at Jed.
“Worth it?” I asked.
He held his hands apart, approximating the absurd length of his fish.
“Totally worth it.”