Marching Band Fish – Gorp, Part 1
[reprinted from 4 December 2011]

I have this goldfish who keeps pretending to kill himself. Well, today it actually happened.

At 5:30 this morning, like every Sunday morning for what feels like 2000 years, I gimped out of my bedroom at the crack of miserable and lurched like a zombie toward the coffee maker as if it contained life-giving brains. (It does!). And I nearly stepped on Marching Band Fish’s silent body.

“Oh no. Oh, dammit, Fish.”

The burn from the tears in my eyes surprised me.

“What the hell are you DOING down there, Fish?” I asked him inanely, my lip quivering, my heart sideways.

Why did he have to leap all the way out this time?

(And why was I getting worked up over a stupid fish?!?)  

Because he was MY fish. And he was sprawled out on the carpet at my feet. Fish are just wrong on the carpet.

“Dammit, Fish.”

Fish had been my reliable if absurd companion for three-and-half-years. I “won” Fish out of a centerpiece at a marching band banquet (thus, the name) when The Boy was still in high school. Fish had lived in four different houses with me. He had been transported (without complaining) in a sealed Ziploc bag back and forth to two different states. Fish was a survivor! Yet here he was lying on the floor in a hideous juxtaposition, a wet goldfish on a scratchy carpet. It was an illogical composition. The space made no sense. My art teacher would have called it “contrived.”

“Dammit, Fish.”

I looked up to see my cat Tweak perched on the back of the couch surveying the desecration.

“You couldn’t have DONE something??”  I asked her, shaking my head. “You couldn’t have at least come and GOT me when Fish leaped out of the tank?” Tweak licked a front paw and ignored me.

“Wait a second… Did YOU have something to do with this???” I yelled and inspected her face for fish scales. Tweak scowled at me like I’d gone insane, and I realized that the cat had no culpability. Tweak has no more interest in Marching Band Fish than she has in a “Dawn of the Dead” movie. I turned back to examine the warp in the morning.

“Dammit, Fish.”

Despite my peculiar sorrow, I had practical matters to consider. I faced the terrible decision of what to do with the body. Do I flush him down the toilet? No, that was ugly. Plus, what if he was too big and clogged everything up? I really didn’t have time to un-stick a fished-up commode. Fish stick. (Stop it!)

In the trash? No, too heartless. Besides, that smell would haunt me. Probably forever. You can’t tuna garbage can. (Seriously, stop it.)

How about outside? I believe in recycling and letting nature do her thang, because certainly worms are better equipped than Febreze at tackling decay, but do I toss him out the front door or out the back? This was not trivial. Out the front and the neighbors might see me and judge me, but out the back and Fish could rot into a mass of fragrant flesh that would summon Bowie-dog like, well, stink on a fish. This decision blew chunks. Solid, white chunks. (You should be put down.)

I was running out of time. I was cranky, uncaffeinated, and getting later for work by the minute. Still undecided, I stomped into the kitchen and grabbed a paper towel to wrap Fish in until I could determine his final resting place, when suddenly he gorped.

What. The. Fish.

I stared. Did his little fish lips just move?? I rubbed my eyes (I literally did this, just like in the movies), and looked down again at his shiny pink body.  It was lifeless. Flat. Still. Maybe the gorp was just gas escaping like in those urban legends where the body suddenly sits up in the morgue and squeals, but it turns out to be just some gastric combustion.

I looked harder, and I saw Fish blink. Or, not blink, exactly, because fish don’t have eyelids but… twitch. His eye twitched. No, his eye SHOUTED. It was like the Whos on Horton’s clover. The tiniest “yop” escaped through Marching Band Fish’s eye.

“No way.”

I picked Fish up by his tail with my bare fingers (paper towel be damned!) and laid him in the tank. He swam, lips-up. No, not “swam.” He kind of bobbed, floating in the water like a Goodyear blimp, but long-ways, his tail pointing down toward the rocks, his face to the ceiling. His eyes bugged out at me, startled about birth. He looked silly. And stupid. And alive. His lips gorped once, then twice.

“No way.”

Cat hair stuck to his sides. He was a Chia fish. His eyes shouted again, and his lips gorped more rapidly. Finally one gill, then both gills flapped, sloughing off cat hair and rug fuzz into a halo of freedom. I sort of wanted to lint-roll him, but I didn’t want to impede his resurrection. After several minutes of bobbing face up like a retarded Vienna sausage, he twisted to right himself, re-orienting to his more normal… fish.

Marching Band Fish has never been a particularly attractive specimen: plain-shaped, nearly colorless, with zero distinguishing marks. Not even a tattoo. He is a child’s drawing of a fish if a child had only the poorly-named “Flesh” crayon. But here he was, swimming lopsided, one fin moving slower than the other like the punch line of a “my foot was nailed to the floor” joke, his crooked body spiraling inside an aurora of cat hair and slime. And at that moment he was beautiful.

“Fish, you magnificent son of a bitch.” The tears ran down my smile.

I had no choice but to go to work and leave him to his tepid physical therapy, but here it is some 15 hours later and Marching Band Fish is still alive. He is swimming straight and sucking rocks and reintroducing himself to the scuba diver on the left every three minutes just like old times. Looking in on Fish just now, I think I saw him grin. Or maybe it was just gas.

 

Erin Waugh — 4 December 2011