Plenty More In The Fishbowl: Meditations of A Lesbian Goldfish

Short comedy fiction (Valentine's Day special)

So you think you got it bad.

There with your gas-station bouquet, waiting for your latest date with your heart that races at nothing anymore, except when there’s another expenses clarification request from the office, or your parents want their keys back. All you can see is neon twitching to part you from your money and your dignity, and a blonde clacking her way toward you who looks nothing like her profile, but who sure seems to have the same design on your money and dignity too.

You call that rock bottom.

Well, four words for you, friend:

Try a freaking fishbowl.

Especially this bowl. The only features here are a few inflated condoms the kid tied to the underwater ferns when he was showing off to his (tragic) homies. Air chairs, I guess you'd call them, if you're a species inclined to sit. Once, food was a thoughtful scatter of the best flakes the kid could afford, and there’d be some attempt to meet my eyes. Now the flakes are greasy dollar-menu stuff, hitting the water in a single dump, and he doesn’t so much as glance at me.

Ash from his cigarettes. Pips from the oranges he slurps down whenever he gets a blackhead. Pesos he accidentally acquires in his weed deals. It all gets tossed in here. Last week, he tore up a poem he was writing and tossed the pieces in, watching moodily as they sank to the bottom like a slow-motion snow globe. I ate a few pieces in desperation. Off the taste alone, let me tell you this: he did the right thing, bailing on that overwrought piece of crap. Sure, he's fourteen and his sat nav is in his boxer shorts, but even I can see the washed-out Marilyn he's chasing ain't worth it, and I’m a goldfish for Chrissakes.

There's no malice in the kid's apathy, that’s the worst thing. I simply no longer register as a living creature to him. I'm a screensaver who shits. No doubt about it: my days are numbered.

And so, as I stare into the dying of the light, I have this to say.

Je ne regrette rien? Fuck that. If you got no regrets, you’re a drug addict, or a serial killer, or a housewife with a pasted-on smile who has all the impulses of an addict and serial killer deep down inside. Regret is the sign of someone who has participated healthily in life, and so found it to be a pretty shoddy enterprise.

I don't believe in bemoaning your lot. In saying everything would have been different if only it hadn’t begun in a funfair bag of tap water. If I hadn't been won at the high striker by a kid with "exclamation" hair, whose first hello was to lewdly wiggle his tongue at me. No, life makes happiness a Houdini challenge for us all, and mine happens to be: you’re in a tank, you got no hands, and your survival depends on a kid so dumb he fails Internet "Are you a robot?" tests.

You find something inside yourself as the hours pass. So many hours. Watching through the glass as the kid sprawls on his bed like he’s fallen from the top of the Empire State. His stereo pounding so hard the grit on the bowl floor is trembling, but he doesn’t seem to even hear it. Then his cell phone rings and, groping around for it without opening his eyes, he loses his balance, and flops down onto the floor. And he misses the call. He misses the goddamn call!

Behind my goggling stare, I am not there. Sometimes, I am way back in the days before the funfair, swimming with my momma and fourteen siblings in the wholesale aquarium tank where the water was tender blue, and the feed was piped out automatically and regular. But sentiment will only kill so many hours. The rest of the time, I’m thinking about the world. So much world I’ve heard about and never seen.

If it's true that women have ended up the smarter sex, here's why: it's that great stretch of history when we were made to stare at a sewing pattern, or at a coital ceiling, or at an abacus while our offspring slowly extracted his finger from his nostril and slid the fucking bead along as instructed. Throughout all that time, women were turning inward, and dreaming, devising, inventing. Simply to keep ourselves from flipping out and holding up a bank with an abacus.

Do not fear the one who is always thinking. Fear the one you assume is not, as you leave them with nothing else to do. Guided by this philosophy, I have gotten through the long days in this corner of the kid’s bedroom. I have grown as a thinker and as a soul, even as the flesh on my bones has diminished, and the pH level of my blood has gone to shit thanks to ammonia.

But there is one thing I have not been able to cultivate within myself, one gratification that only the environment can give me. And that’s: tail.

Hourglass tail. Classy tail. Got more than three-dates-worth-of-talk-in-her tail. At least, those were my hopes at first. Over time, I’ve relaxed my standards some. After all, when you’re red-blooded you've also got to be practical. Not every girl is going to know her isosceles from her equilateral. Her coda from her fugue. Even her Atlantic from her Pacific.

I’ve learned to look beyond that and focus on her interpersonal qualities. Is she a listener, or does she glaze over. Does she know what she's doing, and not tugging and bubbling away in entirely the wrong area. Does she actually deliver on the tickle and tease, or is it all just killing time until the male of the species comes along. Some jock with a contoured chest but a "sensitive" blush in his gills. (Give me a break.)

I've had some close encounters in my time. Moments of chemistry so strong it's like electrolysis in the water between us. But it never goes anywhere. The next time she swims around, it's as though it never happened. Her head is turned away and she’s making a big deal out of ogling the kid as he gets undressed. Or she's talking about a white paper she once read on sexual experimentalism between inmates, and how they return to normal urges once released. And I realize she might be cute, and the only chick I’ll be sharing water with for a few months, but she’s also headfuck alley.

The worst was a couple winters ago. A guppy out of Nebraska, or so she claimed. Looking back, I got no reason to believe a damn word she said. But, my, was she voluptuous. Mouth-watering just to think about. She’d swim up with a coy swish, and the nuzzling would begin. Urgent little kisses and suckling as she explored me. No explanation, no apology, like it was a long-established fact that I was hers.

All of this, you understand, strictly by night. By day, she wouldn’t so much as make conversation. Not even what time was it. If I asked, she’d coldly snap her dorsal at the kid’s alarm clock, its red digits blurry through the filthy glass. I’d stare into that red as my anger throbbed: I deserve better than this, I’m not her furtive 3am sex toy. All the same, when that lonely hour crept back around again, and the moonlight quivered through the water, there’s me, letting her come to me once more. I was only half-sorry when the kid sold her to a friend for a chemistry experiment.

There was one tail above all I can't forget. It’s hard to talk about. A simple creature. Plain, and maybe a little too ready to fall in with the shoal rather than consult her own principles. But in her feelings for me she was true, and she was a homemaker and a diplomat.

She’d arrange the pebbles just the way I liked them. She'd allow me first-serve of the flakes turning to goop on the surface. She’d never take for herself the spot amid the swaying anacharis that I’d identified as the only shelter from the pimpy fairy lights the kid had strung up over the tank. She spoke with feeling but not like she'd heard it in a movie or, worse, yoga class. She knew, I think, that life only gives you so much time, and, if you spend it all on airs and contrivances, you're stealing from yourself in the end.

"Where you are is as wide as you imagine it," she'd say to me, gently chastising, when I'd describe the lavish tank I was going to get us to someday, come hell or low water.

Then one night, the kid staggered up to the tank and spit a tooth from his mouth into the water. His face was a bloody mess, plus his shirt was wrenched half off him, and there were buttons missing. He was yelling boozily into his phone, and I learned from this that he’d gone fists-first at his rival for the poem chick. He’d quickly gotten his dentals edited, courtesy of the other fella's knuckles. Now he looked about as virile as a tampon, cotton wool stuffed in all the bleeding cracks in him. It was the only time I’ve ever felt maternal, looking at him then.

Ain't that ironic. Because that tooth the kid spit into the water? I’m very sure that’s what took her away, my simple girl, my homemaker. She went too close to the tooth as it soured on the grit, falling in with the nonchalance of the two others here back then, and I swear that’s how she got sick. She went first, and the other two soon after.

The support-circle thing to say is: at least it was over quickly and her pain was short-lived. But the truth is, how I wish I’d had her just a little while longer. I could have said a few things. Given her a smile and, ‘Don’t worry, baby, I’ll be alright. There’s plenty more fish in the bowl.’ I’ve had a few weeks to perfect that line since she died, and I know she'd have liked it.

Wait. Something's happening.

The lights have snapped on, and the kid's coming this way. He's got his toothbrush glass in his hand, emptied out. And, for the first time in a long while, he's looking right at me. Weird eyes like he's only half present. Oh boy. Looks like he's been dunking his broken heart in the beer meant for the baby shower again.

The scooping net he's reaching for confirms it. He's done with me. His plans for me exactly, I don't know. But it's fair to say, no worthwhile voyage ever began in a toothbrush glass.

It's over.

I'm shaking, of course. There's no shrink-wrap quite like the soul: no matter its frailty, no matter its suffering, it'll cling to existence. In an airless room, we'll cling to light, and in a lightless life, we'll cling to air. Still, I won't flinch when that net comes down. I'll square what I have in the way of shoulders, and I'll put a look in my eyes like I'm choosing this.

In these last few moments, let me tell you this. You don’t get to choose your tank, or what tail exactly the world puts in it. Your only choice is what you make of it. And okay, maybe no matter who you are or what you do, fraying memories and an ammonia high is all you get for happy in the end.

All the same. Say the line, dumbass. Say the line.