Autistic fairy tale series - The Fisherman Who Sold His Soul

This fairy tale is dedicated to all the neurodivergent souls that have been swept up in the net of the machine called productivity. I have an endless hope that while being in it they can untangle themselves, look out beyond the net and see the glints of shimmering water. And in my mind I hope that they reach out towards the light, and the net dissolves and they can find their way back to themselves.

(This story is also inspired by Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, and the title is inspired by a tale called The Fisherman & His Soul by Oscar Wilde).

There once lived a fisherman whose love of the sea rocked in the depths of his heart.

He visited every day. He would sit on the rocks for hours, watching how the light moved across the water, counting the rhythms of the waves, listening to the particular language of the wind. Different unnameable colours of waves, along with shells and pebbles became his most collectable treasures and the familiarity of them comforted him. He could predict a storm three days before it arrived by the way the gulls turned their heads.

Marcus Selmer’s Photographs of 19th-Century Norwegians

“What use is that?” asked the village. “You cannot live by this way of spending your time. It is indulgence. You cannot sell the pattern of waves.”

The fisherman only smiled, because he was happy, and returned to his rocks.

But the village was not unkind—they were merely practical, as villages must be. The harbour master was growing old and needed someone with a mind for details, for patterns, for numbers. Someone who could track the fishing boats, manage the ledgers, count the catch, organise the merchants.

“You could be so useful,” they told the fisherman. “You have such a gift for seeing patterns. Why waste it on water?”

The fisherman looked at the sea. Then he looked at the village, at their earnest faces, at the harbour master’s tired eyes. They meant well. They wanted to help him become something.

“All right,” he said.

That night, his soul separated from him like a shadow peeling away from a wall. It stood before him, looking like himself but made of sea-light and grey water.

“Don’t do this,” implored his soul. “I am the part of you that loves for no reason. I am the light in the grey water. I am the sitting and watching. If you leave me behind, what will you be?”

“I will be useful,” said the fisherman. “I will be valued. I will be something the world understands.”

“But you will not be whole,” said his soul.

The fisherman turned his back on it and walked to the counting house. Behind him, his soul sat down on the rocks to wait, because that is what souls do when they are left behind. They wait by the water and count the waves and know all the names of grey.

Years passed. The fisherman became the finest harbour master the village had ever known. He tracked every boat, balanced every ledger, organised the merchants with perfect efficiency. The numbers sang to him the way the sea once had—there was pattern in them, rhythm, a kind of beauty.

But it was not the same.

Drawings of whales in the log of the ship Indian Chief kept by Thomas R. Bloomfield (1842–1844) — Source

He worked from dawn until long after dark. The village praised him. They needed him. More boats, more fish, more numbers to track. The harbour was busier than ever, the sea being dredged deeper than ever, though fewer fish came up and the storms grew worse. He recorded it all. He was very good at recording.

He did not go to the rocks anymore. He had forgotten, somehow, that he ever wanted to.

More years passed. The fisherman’s hands cramped from writing. His eyes grew tired from ledgers. His mind, which had once held the naunces of wave and sea colour, now held only columns of figures. He was thirty, then fourty, then fifty. He was valued. He was essential.

He was empty.

One winter morning, he woke and could not rise from his bed. Not from illness, precisely, but from a weight that had no name. The numbers waited for him. The boats waited. The merchants waited. His body would not move.

“I cannot,” he whispered to the empty room. “I cannot continue.”

And something in him remembered.

That afternoon, moving like a man in a dream, he walked away from the counting house. The village called after him, concerned, but he did not turn. His feet knew the way, though his mind had forgotten. Down to the rocks. Down to the sea.

There, sitting exactly where he had left it decades before, was his soul.

It looked up at him with eyes like water. “You came back.”

“I broke,” said the fisherman, and began to weep. “I cannot be useful anymore. I have nothing left to give them.”

“This is the way,” said his soul, and held out its hand.

When the fisherman took it, his soul flowed back into him like the tide coming in, and he gasped at the shock of remembering. The undulating blues and greys. The pattern of waves. The language of wind. The particular slant of light on water at two o’clock on an October afternoon. All of it rushing back, not lost, never lost, only waiting.

Seascape, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1879

He sat down on the rocks. His soul sat beside him, no longer separate but woven back into his bones.

“I forgot how,” the fisherman said. “I forgot how to do this. How to just... be here.”

“Then we will learn again,” said his soul. “We will sit here every day. We will watch the water. We will love it for no reason. We will be gloriously, magnificently unproductive.”

And so he did.

The village worried, at first. Then they found someone else to manage the harbour, because there is always someone else, and the world continues. Some of them understood. Some of them thought he had gone mad. Some of them were a little jealous, watching him sit on the rocks day after day, looking happier than anyone had a right to be while doing nothing.

The fisherman grew old on those rocks. He never caught another fish. He never managed another ledger. He learned the colours all over again, and found there were actually more than he could have ever imagined, and that you could spend a lifetime learning the colours of water and never reach the end.

His soul stayed with him, no longer separate. On quiet mornings, he could feel it humming inside his chest like the sound the sea makes in shells.

He had lost decades to the counting house. That was true. That was the sorrow he carried. But he had this now—the wind, the waves, the sitting and watching. The being with what he loved for no reason except that he loved it.

“Is it enough?” someone once asked him. “Just sitting there? Aren’t you wasting time?”

The old fisherman smiled, the same smile he had smiled as a young man, before he learned to be useful.

“I am spending time,” he said. “There is a difference.”

And he returned to his rocks, where his soul and the sea were waiting, and together they watched the light change on the water, counting nothing, producing nothing, being gloriously, essentially alive.

THE END