Father lost his wedding ring in the ocean once. Like all the trawlermen, he'd
take it from his finger to put on a neck chain, not to lose the finger as the net went out.
Several tides after that, our aunt, while cleaning some hake, found a gold ring
in the belly of one of the fish.
Once she'd washed it off, she examined the letters and numbers engraved
inside. Though it couldn't be true, the date and the initials were those of our parents'
wedding.
By all appearances, Father himself had caught the hake that had swallowed the
ring. In all of the wide blue sea.
That's how we learned it.
Peaceable summer nights bring the inland wind, and the memories.
I look at the sky, and it dawns that coincidences are the planets with the
amplest orbits.
Only every so often have they come round.
The ring's is far too great a coincidence. It would have been lost and found in
that same stone sink. But it doesn't matter. What's most important now is this: for
years and years, the story of the ring was entirely believable to our child-sized
children's intelligence.

Nights, the ocean has the shimmer of hake.
The stars go leaping around like the scales.

Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin