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The Goldfish

She was a fixture in my life just as much as any lamp, table, or bed. She was not to be pondered upon, gaped at, or paid much conscious attention. She simply was.

That wasn’t, of course, to say that she was to be ignored – not that, never that. Does one ignore a furnishing? Not quite. If one did, they would not notice when it was gone. She was just the same, never paid too much overt attention, but noticed and appreciated nevertheless.

I found her when I was ten. Big silver eyes peered out from a backdrop of pearly scales and gauzy fins. She stared, swam away, and quickly returned to gawk at the alien peering through the tank’s glass. In a sense, I suppose that I truly was an alien to her. After all, a human resembles a goldfish about as much as a plank of wood resembles a whale.
Regardless, she found me interesting and I could not help but reciprocate the feeling. That day, I gave the saleswoman two dollars and twelve cents. She gave me a bagged fish. It was one of the best trades I’ll ever made.

Like the scattered goldfish I’d kept before her, I never thought of Little Sweetie (I named her this to jokingly spite my father – his most hated coworker referred to his wife by this very same moniker) as a possession. Rather, she was an omnipresent snowy ghost with a splash of red on the top of her head, as though she had been dripped upon by a leaky can of paint. Sweetie was Sweetie. She was not of a specific race, species, or color, but rather an entity unto her own that stubbornly defied any and all attempts at categorization.

As time passed I bought her tankmates that came and went, but none
ever seemed to be as indefinable as Sweetie. Sweetie was simply different in her own endearingly irritating fashion.

She took food from my hand and nibbled at my fingers. She loved swimming under the flow of new water and narrowly escaping being dashed against the gravel below. She knew precisely where I wanted to place my siphon and invariably managed to beat me to it, hovering in the desired area until I admitted defeat and moved elsewhere, to which she would scurry. If that failed, she would nibble at my fingers to make clear her vexation and scamper to the next object that caught her eye. She was an endless source of annoyance and delight, neither of which was clearly greater than the other.

It was no surprise, then, that I was depressed when the five-year-old goldfish succumbed to a strange illness in a matter of days. It wasn’t quite grief and certainly not apathy, but rather a distinct, numb feeling of wrongness as I looked into the bathroom mirror through the half-cracked door (she developed separation anxiety after she became alone, so I left the door open so she could always see me) or glance away from my computer screen and instinctively look to her tank only to find that my little girl was not there.

She was missing. It didn’t feel like she was dead (that fact hasn’t quite hit me and maybe it never will), simply missing. My little girl was not bobbing endlessly at the water’s surface in a desperate plea for food. She was not harassing snails as they scoured the tops of the tank walls, erasing an hour’s climb in seconds. She did not poke at the gravel or sleep in the back corner of the tank. She was missing, and with her a bit of the life in my room.

It is true that I will doubtlessly keep other goldfish in the future, but none will ever be quite like Sweetie. None will ever replace my little girl who was not white nor a goldfish nor a fish at all, because at the end of the day, she simply was an entity all her own, and she was. For now, that is enough.

-

This is a tribute to my five-year-old goldfish, Little Sweetie. She traveled in the car with me as I moved away from North Carolina (US) when she was two. She died about two weeks ago and like I said, I'm not exactly depressed, but I still get the feeling of wrongness whenever I look into her tank and she's not there.

Sure, I have my 7-8 minnows and two cories in the ten-gallon tank that sits below Sweetie's fifteen-gallon, but I don't really feel much for them. They're just there, and while I like watching them, they don't mean as much to me as Sweetie did. I'm still training myself out of looking over to her tank (It's almost empty now. I'm taking everything out and I'm going to start over from scratch - all I'll keep is the tank itself, the undergravel filter, and maybe the filter itself - everything else will be removed) and trying to get used to the fact that my room, where I spend most of my day by myself (I like to be alone, it gives me freedom), is a little lonelier now.

I'll get used to it... Maybe. I'ts hard when you spent a massive percentage of your life with this creature, fed it every day, spent countless hours cleaning its tank and playing with it, and suddenly it's gone. It just doesn't seem right that she's not there. Anyhow, this was a memoir as part of a summer reading project, but I liked writing it nonetheless. Hope you guys liked it, too!

Yeah, carnival goldfish... That's what got me into this darned goldfish-keeping hobby that I've had ever since I was 3! My parents made the mistake of thinking that what happened to your goldfish would happen to mine (She was named Fish-a-lock, surprisingly. Unsurprisingly, the next one was named Goldy. Oddly enough, that one died relatively quickly...) but instead she lived for over a year. It started there, and well, now I've never gone without a goldfish for more than a few months at a time.

This is probably the worst case of goldfish blues that I've ever had, but then again, I had Sweetie for quite literally a third of my lifespan to date. One tends to get attached to anything, even an inanimate object, that they have posessed for that long, so it's no surprise that I miss her. I still need to finish cleaning her tank out. I just don't know what to do with all those snails! There are literally hundreds of them, and I would beat myself up if I killed them all. They are the same species that lives in the pond in my neighborhood, and I think all traces of disease are gone from the tank, so maybe if I put in just the snails and none of the tank water it would be okay...?

On the upshot, my favorite minnow (She has no name, but I can tell her apart from the seven others because her tail is crooked at the base. From the top, she looks sort of like a bloated lightning bolt. I think it's crooked because when I had my first real brood of babies, I tried to pour all 8 into a small fish bowl, but many flopped free in transit. Luckily, I managed to find all but one on my carpet and they all survived, but I accidentally bent one's tail. It looked like it straightened as she grew, but I guess not.) had babies and I got to to watch them being born. Even though I've had 3-5 broods before this I've never gotten to watch them being delivered.

It was much easier to save them this time because I have a breeder box now, which helps prevent the babies from being eaten by both their mother and her tankmates. To my knowledge, the mother only ate one of the total 27 babies. Two vanished due to being born before I got the mother in the breeder box, but I still have 24 to raise. They seem to be doing well in their fishbowl (I have a couple spare to use for breeding and quarantine tanks. The babies will go into the ten-gallon tank that has all of the filtration systems and live plants once they get bigger), though I can't tell if I've lost any - there are too darn many to count except when I saw them coming out!

...Say, anyone want some baby minnows? Free and 2nd-generation domestic-bred!

Aww... Poor Crimson. And what do you mean "I'm good"? Seriously, take some fish!

crying Dang it... Maybe I'll give some to Sammy, my best friend. I need to figure out what to do with them. I can't just throw them in the lake (even if their species lives there) because this is my second generation of captive-bred minnows. They might not be able to survive on their own!

I know, but like I said, they're second-generation captive-bred. While I've fed them live food regularly (food would not be an issue), they wouldn't be able to distinguish predators fast enough to run away. They'd get eaten relatively quickly.

That's exactly the problem. You know nets, which most fish run away from as if the very hounds of hell are nipping at their heels? Well, the fry just stared at it for a while, watched it wave around, and promptly ignored it. Some even approached. The same held true with my hand. So, yeah, basically... They're doomed.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I can't do that! They'll sell them as feeder fish. They're my cute little fry, dammit!