the goldfish and a great lake
By Kat Ray, 1st Year ETA
goldfish must not be kept in bowls;
folks often do not know that. they need a tank of at least twenty gallons, regularly tested for ammonia and other things. they must eat more than just fish flakes to thrive; you should give them worms and bugs and stuff. yet even the best care cannot stop a sentient goldfish from yearning. they are much like me.
i knew a goldfish in a well-filtered tank. he had orange and black flecked scales and big, round eyes. he could see the lake through the near window (in the few hours when the child was not facing him, blocking his view). he would sigh, watching.
the other fish did not have the brains for yearning, but had brains enough for wisdom (and gossip).
“if you leave,” they said to him and each other,
“you may grow. for a goldfish may only grow as big as his pond.”
so the goldfish, after hearing this and mulling it over,
escaped.
he shot from the tank water like a dolphin and flopped along the flooring, flailing without sight and without aim for what seemed like years to him across wood, across pavement, across rocks, across dirt and mud and silt until — gulp — he was swallowed up by the deep pit of a dark, massive lake.
he breathed at last, heart racing, eyes spinning and then focusing on the cold green murkiness above and below him. he tried to swim to the bottom, not to count the pebbles as he used to do; just instead to know that they were there. but he could not reach the ground without losing his head.
he was at first scared and enchanted;
the endless deep, the spacious silence.
and then scared and amused;
the new fishes, the new diet.
and then scared and alone;
no falling flakes, no watchful eyes.
and then scared.
weeks passed of unfocused swimming beneath the current at the top, heart thumping against his ribs.
he did not and could not get bigger, as he had not eaten nor barely breathed one deep breath.
his scales turned gray, and his blood was low like a dull pain. his heart now groaned as a chant vibrating still in the open water. his eyes rolled back as if they could find and catch his brain running away to his tank at home.
home, how strange a word; he mused as it once
meant a small glass prison, too small for his scales and fins to grow, too exposed for him to feel comfortable within them. yet now, it was all he yearned for; the rhythmic tapping of a child’s finger to the glass, the gruel that floated down and rotted in the pebbles, the blue and pink substrate that he had counted and named. the mold that grew on his fins from statued sameness. the other fish, always there, frustratingly always there, the melody of their conversations, often shared, often with a smile and the wave of a tail.
he yearned for home, now.
now, alone, his own pet goldfish in need of
tedious care. drifting, eyes finding purchase on the neverending black emptiness below. who could’ve guessed that to live alone meant to survive alone; to get bigger meant to eat, and to eat meant to hunt, and to hunt meant to swim, and to swim meant to wander through water of one hundred fathoms deep.
who knows what lies below?
and so he went belly up; drifted on his back, eyes blinking and straying up toward the top of the lake for a moment before crusting shut completely. he cursed himself for thinking he was good enough to grow. he mustn’t be kept in a bowl, nor must he be let in the great deep.
he did not know what to do, but he had no strength to swim anymore. the waves carried his ragdoll body up to the surface of the lake.
it was warm here, as if there was a tank heater. why? he pried open his weary eyes.
and he saw the moon.
the tank had never let him; the people closed the
window shades at night, so he saw neither it nor the sunrise. he had imagined what it would look like; perhaps similar to the ambient light left on atop the tank. but it was nothing of the sort.
he mustered up all the strength left within his little body to swim even further toward the surface to see it better. he didn’t care about growing anymore. he just wanted to survive enough seconds to see the moon. he didn’t care how big he looked, nor at this point how zombied he looked, either.
his scales brightened in the starlight, anyway. and, to his surprise, he found bits of insects just at the surface. not as nutritious nor readily there as fish pellets, but there, and food. he gobbled them, and at once the tiny engine of his body fueled enough to clear his cloudy eyes. the moon glowed with even more cosmic vivid light.
the surface’s space gave him a bit less control as the cold deep, yet there was warmth and food and beauty and perhaps sometimes, being dragged by the currents was good. he let the current take him.
it led him, at last, to the shallow. he could see the pebbles. he could hear the distant muffled speech of children playing in the water. unfamiliar in patterns, yet too known as any child’s voice could be.
he could be alone now, he would tell himself. if he might just have the moon for company.
but the moon became brighter as he had another
fish to point it out to; first it was a passing guppy, amused at the strange goldfish’s enchantment, then enthralled himself with what he hadn’t seen in the steady moon before. then it was a shrimp, then a snail. different from his fish friends before, and the moon knew he missed them. the new fish’s presence and conversations with each other at times made him more lonely than when he was in the deep, at times made him feel at home again in their steadiness. he pondered why he felt these ways.
he might just survive gently here, in the new shallow, this home he’d known and not known. he might just grow slowly here.
i do not think every goldfish is meant for the great lake. some are not even meant for the shallow. some should see the moon from their ambient lighting, some should see the moon at the lake’s surface. others should see the moon in the glowing deep-sea fish below.
i am just absolutely certain they must not be kept in bowls.
[Featured photo by Kat Ray]
