Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain
The first story I remember writing was about a man who caught a two-headed fish. He held it in his hand, marveling at it for a while, and then he noticed that it had another hook in it's mouth. Somebody else had caught it and let it go. So he carefully removed his hook and set it free.
I don't know how old I was when I wrote that, but I'm still trying to write a better story.