One Fish, No Fish

The say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine,
and the little plastic castle
is a surprise every time.
It's hard to say if they're happy,
but they don't seem much to mind."
~ Ani Difranco, "Little Plastic Castle"

Goldie has gone belly up. Truth be told, she went side up. Or he. I'm not sure whether the solitary bowl swimmer, which spent most of its days and nights on a fireplace mantel in a dark basement, was a girl fish or a boy fish. All I know is that, thanks to me, it's a dead fish.

I don't know what I did differently in my changing of the water. It wasn't too cold. I didn't clean the bowl with soap. The only thing I omitted was the fish-coat stuff that keeps fish from suffering a sort of scale rot. I ran out of that. No big deal, I thought.

Just an hour from the time I moved the fish, which seemed not ill in the least, it was dead.

I can't say I haven't wished it hundreds of times in the last almost-four years. I was the only one who ever changed the stinky, stringy-poop-filled water. I was the only one who fished the fish out of its mucky, poopy soup with the green net.



When we first got the fish (two of them, one of which my daughter fed to death) from the magician at my daughter's fifth birthday party, we did the works: colorful gravel, a plastic castle, a couple of groovy plastic plants waving in the current of fish circles. But then I got lazy, weary of washing all the pieces, tired of stirring poopy stones with my fingers to pry all the shit loose, wary of losing even more gravel down the drain.

So I've felt sorry for Goldie, alone, day after day, in a tiny bowl, swimming in circles in the dark. It can't have been much of a life. Even though I killed it by accident, I can't help thinking that I might have done it a favor.

Remember when Barbara Bush made that comment about the victims of Hurricane Katrina last year? She said, upon seeing them crowded into the Houston Astrodome, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

What I mean by the comparison is: who am I to know what was better for the goldfish? Perhaps it liked its life just fine. Just because I wouldn't have been comfortable swimming in circles, castle-less, doesn't mean the goldfish didn't have a fine life. After all, it never tried to jump to its death like my sister's fish, which was often found floundering on the floor minutes later. It didn't attempt to eat itself to death. It never held its breath and turned blue.

And so we say goodbye to Goldie, the happiest, longest-lived fresh-water goldfish we have ever known. May it fertilize the tomatoes and the basil without making them fishy.

And in a few weeks, I'm going to dig up the little skeleton for my collection.