The bowl was small, but big enough for a single goldfish. It
was home. A watery sphere where on most days food would alight on the water
without the effort of the hunt. It was safe. No big fish to eat little fish, no
currents to sweep away; a couple of litres of goldfish tranquillity sitting on
an old veneered sideboard.
Inside his world Billy the fish swam around and around. Sometimes
pressing his fishy face to the glass, other times bobbing to the surface to
gulp the stale air trapped inside the bowl. Of course his name wasn’t really
Billy. Nobody had bothered to name him. He was just fish, but any creature
without an identity seems wrong somehow - at least it does to me. Not to
everyone though.
Billy didn’t notice the change at first. There was nothing
to see, no obvious modification to his watery world. The first he, or it could
have been she (fish are so hard to sex) felt of his impeding death was a
tingling in his gills and a soreness around his already bulging eyes. The water
smelled wrong, it tasted wrong too. It felt like water, it looked like water,
but it hurt and burnt. He floated to the surface then sank down again, listing
to one side as the change began to take effect. His tail flipped and then
flipped once more as he sank to the bottom where he lay panting. His gills
worked hard in a last desperate attempt to survive as he flew to the surface
and failed to leap out of the water. Whatever was eating into his shiny golden
body had won. He turned upside down on the surface before sinking once more to
the bottom where he settled like a lump of carrot. If he’d only known he was
alive, he may have felt his death. But do fish really have any understanding of
their own mortality?
After a while Billy’s body rose again to float on the
surface like some very unsatisfactory resurrection for a very small fishy Jesus.
It was two days before anyone noticed him rotting on the surface, by which time
his glinting shine had dulled to grey, his eyes had become a milky white and
all signs of his small life had dispersed into the poisoned dead water. The
smell of the bleach was hardly noticeable now, the only odour dead fish. Of
course nobody noticed and nobody cared, and that was only part of the problem
with this particular nobody.
After nobody cried at his passing he was unceremoniously
emptied into a different bowl, white porcelain this time, and flushed away as
if he had never existed. Just a small life, in a small world, doing small
things to pass the time, so small it shouldn’t have had any impact on anything
at all. But sometimes it’s the nothings that start the ball rolling and before
you know it there’s an avalanche on its way.
And so the death of one small fish became the start of a big,
big future. Of course not for Billy the fish, just for nobody really.
Neil Barrett on FB
ReplyDelete"Im free"! The daft old git fell for the old upside down trick,Ha.
Neil Barrett's photo.
Neil Barrett
DeleteWhat's the title, Nemo?
Andrew Height
DeleteDon't know yet Neil. That isn't how it works, but at the minute it's called Drowning the Goldfish.
Neil Barrett
DeleteThought provoking
Andrew Height
DeleteWell, maybe Neil. But it'll probably just end up as 20,000 words of nonsense and then I'll give up.
Neil Barrett
DeletePut them in the right order and you might have something.
Andrew Height
DeleteThat's the hard bit Neil and there needs to be 100,000 of them. That, and having a story.
Cloe Fyne on FB
ReplyDeleteI cried when mine died. My little saviour fish they were x
Andrew Height
DeleteThis is just a story. Something to preface something I'm thinking of working on.