There was definitely something peculiar with the man eating fish about pier 18. But, as I later realized while having a cheap and greasly platter of french fries for myself at Salve’s sailor’s diner, it was not the fact that he seemed to eat the fish alive – the pale flesh barely visible in the dusk of the harbour lights and it´s size giving no particular determination of species – rather how he acknowledged me as I walked past him.
Outside Salve’s, the moist and cold weather that had greeted me when I arrived in port a few days past, showed no sign of letting up. The outline of the harbour were visible from the diner, but gazing beyond the loading construct and the warehouses revealed nothing but dark or grey contours. They strangely reminded me of the works of the delusioned Austen, whose degenerate vistas and creatures bore shapes of the same unfathomable and inconclusive character. At about the time I met with the fish eater, the sight of the S/S Salmon could well have been one of those lost gargantuan horrors, still visible in the haze, it’s rusty brown fore looming in the distance across the bleak water. The cargo ship had anchored a day after my own ship’s arrival.

The muffled rattling from the tram stole my eyes from the S/S Salmon’s would be whereabouts and had me gazing along the street that connected the commercial district with the docks. From my unfolded tourist’s guide map, which had started to fall apart quickly from the moist weather and my careless handling, showed that Roth street actually bifurcated just beyond the old customhouse, and from there became Roth Lane and Albertstreet. It was on Albertstreet I had been walking, continuing down Roth and then sighted the lone man in the harbour. I first had a glimpse of him by the containers that blocked entrance to the minor piers, a somewhat stout silhoutte in a coat. As I walked on, I lost sight of him and thought no further of him, until pier 18 emerged out of the fog. The man was facing the water front, his head turned slightly upward with his hand making a grip that seemed to need slight adjustment. As I walked closer, curious as to what the nature of his doings were, a slippery sound broke the monotony of the windy sea, like clatter of movement against an unyielding material. As I later recalled, several times – first at the sailor’s diner – I was so startled by the sight of what he was trying to push into his mouth that I halted and very quickly turned and walked away. But beyond these reckonings I have learned that I even walked past the stranger and that he looked at me with malice. Last night I dreamed of him, his grotesque lips pale and swollen, either from some distortion of his flesh or the chafing of the headless twitching fish. And the sound he made. Unintelligible.