[Reprinted from 15 February 2011]
I lost Marching Band Fish this morning. Well, I didn’t LOSE him. Fish don’t ESCAPE.
Actually, sometimes they do. Sometimes fish jump right out of their tanks and gorp all over the floor. Sometimes in the middle of the night, while you’re busy dreaming about soccer players and other floppy-haired mammals, fish try to commit suicide by leaping out of their beautifully-decorated tanks (“A scuba diver? Really? How original.” – MB Fish), landing splatty and dry on the carpet (“Is heaven lined with cat hair?”), then realizing quickly that escape was NOT AT ALL what they’d had in mind. (“Gorp!”). So you pick them up in a paper towel and drop them back in the water, and three hours later… RESURRECTION!
But that was December’s story. Two months ago.
Today, on a cold February morning, I opened the lid of Fish’s tank (A lid! I am trainable!) only to find him floating near the bottom. Maybe not floating, maybe sinking. And not gorping. I must have yelped. The Boy mumbled at me from around a bagel:
“What?” Eloquent, that one.
“It’s Fish!”
“What did you do?” Eloquent and confident in my skills as a care-giver.
“I didn’t do anything! He’s just… he’s not… he’s sideways.”
Marching Band Fish was lying crooked in the corner awkwardly hugging the scuba diver. Or being strangled. I examined the scene closely, but the scuba diver had not trapped Fish; this was not some spiteful homicide in retaliation for Fish’s insensitive commentary. I upshifted from “stunned” to “rescue” mode, sucked water into a turkey baster, and blew some liquid miracle (I’d hoped) over Fish’s head, a kind of gill-fed CPR. The blowing lobbed him up to the surface too vigorously, Simba being lifted by Mufasa (HERE HE IS, BITCHES!), and Fish gorped once, possibly out of resentment. (WHY AM I UP HERE??). His lips moved, and he glared at me. I blew some more water over his gills and, as a kindness, rotated him to his other side, like they do with old people. In the nursing home. In the dying place. He gorped a few more times then floated gently, a slow see-saw to the bottom, to the coffin of blue stones.
“Dammit, Fish.”
His shiny pale torso was naked, vulnerable, like a surgical patient. There was too much real estate highlighting his surrender, a beacon: “I DIDN’T MEAN TO DIE HERE!” I propelled him gently with the turkey baster back to the corner where he came to rest at the feet of the scuba diver. The gush of foreign water had stirred detritus up from the bottom of the tank, and it swirled around him like shit confetti. A fish parade. A snow globe of death. Fish summoned enough energy to roll his giant eye up at me. If he’d had middle fingers, I think he would have used one. Or two, if the other wasn’t pinned underneath him by the weight of defeat.
“Dammit, Fish.”
“Are you sure he’s not just resting?” The Boy asked around some juice.
“No, he’s bereft of life.”
Settling for the final time next to his guardian diver, Marching Band Fish grew still. Gravity pulled his lacy fins in close to his body. They had no more work to do. His lips gorped once, “Goodbye,” and twice, “Thank you,” then… nothing.
“Dammit, Fish.”
It’s just a fish. An ordinary, unremarkable fish utterly devoid of anything special. Except that he was mine. I fed him every morning, and sometimes in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening, or really, whenever he asked for it. Because, what other conversation do you HAVE with a fish, except about food?
“How’s the weather in there, Fish?”
“Oh, you know, it’s about room temperature. Maybe you could blow me.”
He’s just a fish, a stupid fish. But… Dammit, Fish.
I haven’t had the heart to disturb him yet. He’s still lying sideways at the bottom of his watery blue casket covered in a shit celebration next to his beloved frenemy, the scuba diver. One thing about fish, they’re easy to dispose of. At least their little pink bodies are. The scuba diver, on the other hand, probably won’t flush.
Dammit, Fish.
RIP, Marching Band Fish.
Adopted May, 2009, from a Marching Band Banquet,
“Buried” 15 February 2012, Somewhere in the System
