Show Notes
For twenty-two years, an aging captain has fished the rings of a sea that drains endlessly into a vast hole past the horizon, where the catch grows richer the closer a boat dares to go. Each time he comes up short, the cannery that owns his trawler rivets another iron plate to her bow, and the newest one now sits at the waterline. One more short season will cost him his boat.
The only water rich enough to save him lies beyond the Barren Ring, where no bird flies and no net comes up with anything. When he was a boy, one man crossed it and came home so heavy with fish that the sea ran across his deck. The cannery rang the bell kept for a man who owes nothing and put his smiling face on every tin, and the boy pasted a hundred of those labels above his bed.
Forty-four years later, that man still waves at the harbor mouth every morning from a freshly painted boat the cannery has never let him sail. Now, with one season left, the captain takes his own crew across the Barren Ring, where no captain since has ever come back.
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