Crystal and Her Lionfish
By Marshall Geck
I opened the front door to find my aquarium shattered and its contents strewn all over my living room floor. My eyes went wide and I nearly fell over from shock. I ran across the room and unplugged the aquarium to prevent the spilled liquid from causing an electrical hazard. When I turned back to assess the disaster, I almost couldn’t bear to look.
It was a semi-aquatic graveyard. Once radiant and colorful corals were crushed and scattered in thousands of concrete-grey pieces. My parrot fish, clown fish, sea snails, and anemones lay shrivelled and motionless on my soggy carpet. Mixed in among the fish corpses were trillions of shards of broken aquarium glass. Tears welled up in my eyes. I threw my hands up to my head in despair.
An already horrendous day couldn’t get any worse. Earlier, Crystal and I had a fiery breakup. As if spending the entire morning and afternoon being torn apart by her attacks wasn’t soul crushing enough, now everything else I cared about in the world lay broken and dead in the middle of my living room. Although rationally I knew she had nothing to do with it, somehow it felt like her revenge. She never liked my aquarium. Given half a chance, she probably would have gladly shattered it herself.
I stood there crying, head in my hands while cold water seeped out of my carpet onto my feet and flip-flops.
Oddly, there was also a yellow leaf next to my toes. I sniffled, wiped away my tears, and looked curiously at the misplaced object by my feet. It wasn’t alone. When I looked around at the terrible scene again, I was stunned to see an assortment of yellow, orange, and brown fall leaves stuck to the soaked carpet with the rest of the wreckage. Not only that—many of the glass shards appeared not to be from an aquarium. Something was off.
It was only then that I felt the breeze. I gazed up from the floor to view my window overlooking East Broadway and the park. Jagged spikes of glass and a gaping hole stared back at me.
I raised an eyebrow in bewilderment. Who in the neighborhood had I pissed off enough to make them throw a rock through my window? And with enough force to carry it all the way across the room to the aquarium? I stepped over the squishy carpet to get a better look when something sitting in a crater of sand inside the aquarium caught my eye.
It was no rock. It was a baseball.
Adrenaline of shock transformed into rage. I had a pretty good idea which loud-mouthed Southie teenagers the ball belonged to. Crystal and I had asked them numerous times to move farther into the park to do their batting practice after a stray ball nearly took out my mailbox. My blood boiled.
I stomped towards the front door. I would march over to their house, unload on the little brats, and demand the parents pay for everything.
That’s when I felt the sting.
The skin of my foot tightened, and a terrible burning sensation rushed up my leg. I lost my balance and splashed down onto the wet carpet, screaming in agony. My face, beard, T-shirt, and shorts all became drenched in quick succession. Bloody gashes broke out all over my body as I made contact with the glass shards on the floor. I thrashed around in panicked confusion. When I turned to look at whatever was terrorizing my foot, I saw the unmistakeable orange and white stripes, extravagant pectoral fins, and spotty tail.
It was Crystal’s lionfish. Three of its venomous dorsal spines had pierced through my flip-flop and lodged deep in my foot.
I clenched my chest to get control of my breath. The pain was searing, unbearable. Cringing, I pulled my leg towards my hand. Carefully, I laced my fingers around the slimy fish, avoiding the other stinging spines. I turned my face away, counted to three, and then pulled the dorsal spines out of my foot with one swift yank.
The curse word I let out was so loud I wouldn’t have been surprised if all of Boston heard it. Blood gushed out of my foot, turning my brown flip-flop maroon red. I dry-heaved at the sight of it. Black splotches hopped around my eyes.
Terrified I was going to faint, I reached into my pocket for my cell phone and dialed 911.
“911, what is your emergency?” the woman on the line responded.
“I stepped on a lionfish!”
“Sorry sir, can you repeat that? You stepped on a fish?”
“Yes! A poisonous fish!”
“How did you manage to do that, sir?”
“It doesn’t matter! I’m in extreme pain and need help now!”
“Okay sir, what’s your name and address?”
“Patrick O’Brien. I’m at 143 East Broadway!”
“Okay Patrick, I need you to calm down and listen to me. I’m sending paramedics, but you’re panicking and breathing very heavily. If you were stung by a venomous animal, panicking is only going to make the poison spread faster. I need you to take a deep breath and try to relax for me, okay? Can you do that?”
I closed my eyes, clutched my throbbing leg, and prayed to God that this was rock bottom. Crystal couldn’t have ordained a more-fitting misfortune upon me if she’d wanted to. The lionfish may have been responsible for my searing sting, and the neighbor teens may have been responsible for the baseball that broke my aquarium, but I wouldn’t have been in the miserable position I found myself in if not for her. There was no doubt in my mind about that.
--
The lionfish was like her in so many ways. Like its gleaming orange-and-white stripes, Crystal had stunning orangish-blonde hair, along with the smooth, milky-white skin of a Yankee Irish. Like its big, flamboyant, spotty-finned display, her face was freckled in all the right places and she always knew exactly what trendy outfit would show off her perfect body best. And like the lionfish’s aggressive behaviour and ravenous appetite, she had a commanding presence and big mouth to match.
When I first saw her at my friend Kevin’s New Year’s Eve house party the previous year, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Not only did she look striking, she was the life of the party from the moment she walked in with her girlfriends and took off her snow-caked coat. She cheered wildly while playing drinking games with the group. She turned up the music and dragged her girlfriends into the living room to dance. She jokingly argued with someone that Boston was “complete shit compared to New York.” All I could do was stand against the frozen window by the refrigerator and watch from afar, pretending I actually cared about my friends’ debate of how many Super Bowls the Patriots had to win before their record became effectively insurmountable in our lifetimes.
It proved to have some value though. When she left the dance floor and strode toward us near the refrigerator to get another drink, she overheard our conversation. And of course, she had a strong opinion about football. She wasted no time in chiming in. Even with a few drinks flowing through me, my heart sprinted the moment she took a place next to me. I held my beer tight and sporadically put my arm up to scratch the balding spot on the back of my head. That’s when she turned to me.
“What do you think, beard man? You haven’t said anything yet.” She pointed up at me with the neck of her beer bottle.
“Me?” I said, now barely able to breathe.
“Yes, you! Do you speak English?”
I can’t remember my response. The combination of alcohol and nerves took over. However, it must have been pretty bad, because I remember her saying: “That’s the biggest load of BS I’ve ever heard.” The entire group broke out in laughter.
She kept her focus on me after that, asking my opinion on a wide variety of things, as if fishing for more bad responses to make fun of me with. I didn’t mind. I couldn’t believe she was showing so much interest in me. My friends seemed similarly surprised. They gave me a wink or a smirk, and then one-by-one slowly peeled away, leaving just the two of us talking by the refrigerator for the rest of the party.
“So, what are you passionate about, Patrick? What do you look forward to every day?” she asked.
My mind went blank. The gears in my head turned, searching for an answer, but they got me nowhere.
“Uh, I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it. You go first. What are you passionate about?”
“Modelling,” she replied without hesitation. “I know I have what it takes to be a professional model, but no one can be a model in Boston. I need to be in New York. I’ve had a few photo shoots there, but for now I’m just doing the executive assistant thing until I can save enough money to pay off my student loans and move there.”
Her answer came as no surprise to me. She was so beautiful. How could she not be a model?
“So, that’s me. Have you had enough time to think about you yet?”
I was mesmerized by her blue eyes with the little green rings around the iris. They seemed to sway and flow, just like the sea, and they instantly made me think of my aquarium.
“That’s a dorky hobby!” she said playfully after I told her. “How did you get into that?”
I explained to her that my friend Kevin and I liked to smoke pot and watch Shark Week or Blue Planet, from which I developed a fascination with oceans. I also explained to her how working in a hardware store for so many years taught me enough about pumps, lights, water chemistry, and just about every conceivable part of a fish tank that I realized I could easily manage my own. I told her how one day I bought a massive aquarium on Craigslist, installed it in my living room, and started adding something new to it every week—anemones, corals, snails, and countless tropical fish. Eventually, caring for the colorful marine ecosystem I created became the thing I looked forward to most every day.
“Well, I don’t understand it at all. But I’m glad it makes you happy!” she said.
We continued talking until it was nearly midnight. With one minute to go, everyone staggered over to Kevin’s huge flat screen TV to watch the New Year’s Eve ball drop over a snowy Times Square. We were laughing and making bets about who would break their New Year’s resolution first. When the clock hit ten seconds and the flashy ball neared the bottom, everyone started chanting along with the countdown.
Suddenly, Crystal grabbed my face—beard and all—and said point blank: “Are you going to man up and kiss me at midnight?”
I felt like I had been hit with a club, but knew that if I hesitated, I would never forgive myself. I turned off my brain and went for it. Our lips smashed together just as a deafening eruption of drunken cheers and obnoxious streamer noises filled the room.
--
Crystal picked out the lionfish not long after we decided to be exclusive. I thought it would help her see the allure in my hobby if she added her own fish to the aquatic artwork. From the moment she saw it in the fish store, she was dead set on it. She told me it “looks way cooler than those boring coral reefs. All they do is just sit there.”
I knew lionfish were territorial and poisonous, but the one she picked was fairly small. How much damage could it do? Plus, I wasn’t about to say no to Crystal the first time she showed any interest in my aquarium.
The lionfish added a whole new element of color to my aquarium, just as Crystal added a whole new element of color to my life in those initial days. Anyone who came over invariably told me the lionfish was their favorite fish in the tank, just as they all seemed impressed that I’d found myself such a beautiful and spunky girlfriend. It was also a relief when my parents in Somerville stopped nagging me about when I was finally going to find someone and settle down.
But as the lionfish grew bigger and bigger and filled up more of the tank, so too did Crystal gradually take up all the space in my life. She expected me to go shopping with her every weekend, insisted that we eat out at high-end restaurants during the week, and demanded that we escape the New England winter by flying down to the Florida beaches.
It wasn’t long before all this spending drove my credit card into the red. On the rare occasions when I questioned these expenses or suggested thrifty alternatives, she was quick to interrogate me about why I’d never finished my degree and worked a dead-end job in a hardware store.
“You could be making a lot more money if you showed some ambition,” she said. “Then this wouldn’t be an issue.”
At one point, I thought about finishing my degree on a daily basis. But the longer I put off the decision, the less I felt like I had what it took to stay up late writing papers and studying for exams like a student again. Eventually, it was much easier to just come home, smoke some pot, and work on my aquarium every night than to confront such anxiety-inducing thoughts. So, I brushed aside Crystal’s rebukes about my degree as just expressions of tough love.
Besides, it’s not as though I had an abundance of chances to do fun things with a beautiful girl. Sure, it might have been hard on the wallet, but when was the last time I let myself live large?
A few months passed and as the lionfish grew, it became more aggressive. It wasn’t long before smaller fish inexplicably disappeared without a trace. I stood there staring at the tank and stroking my beard, only curious about where they might have vanished to at first. Although I inspected every inch of the tank for a hole they might have accidentally slipped out of, it was completely sealed as usual. Other times, I’d find some of my larger fish mysteriously lying dead in the sand. Hauling out their corpses and bringing them to the trash became a new grief-filled ritual after work every few weeks. I painstakingly checked the water chemistry, temperature, and fish food ingredients for any sign of something that would have killed them. I never found an answer.
It wasn’t lost on me that the lionfish could have been responsible for their strange deaths. I just didn’t have proof. I contemplated getting rid of it numerous times to test my theory, but the thought of Crystal’s reaction always stopped me. She had developed a special bond with the lionfish. Whenever she came over to my house, she walked right up to the tank and greeted it affectionally. The lionfish, in turn, put its face up against the glass and fluttered its tail like a wagging puppy. Everything else in the tank might as well have been invisible to her.
Still, my confusion and anxiety mounted with every aquatic friend I lost. Eventually, I stopped replacing them, since buying fish that would just die or disappear increasingly felt like a waste of money.
At the same time, the friends in my life were slowly disappearing. For example, Crystal’s displeasure would be endless if I ever suggested we change date night because I wanted to play poker with the guys instead. She also didn’t want me to see Kevin anymore.
“He’s a bad influence on you,” she said. “How are you supposed to ever grow up and join the real world if you’re spending all your time with people who like to do juvenile things like smoke pot and veg out in front of the TV?”
Though I missed hanging out with Kevin, I rarely had time to just sit around and smoke pot anymore with all the “adult things” she had me doing. Months went by without my seeing or speaking to Kevin. Before long, Crystal became the only person I spent time with. Even my parents became concerned that I rarely dropped by their house in Somerville anymore. This was just as well to me. I didn’t need the extra stress of another lecture from them about how I wasn’t acting the same and “seemed always anxious and on edge.”
Like Crystal, the lionfish’s demands knew no bounds, and they both had nasty forms of protesting if they didn’t get their way. Whenever I opened the top of the aquarium to feed my fish, for example, the lionfish always swam under my hand and threw up its big flashy pectoral fins to scare away the other fish. It ate everything in sight without leaving so much as a speck for the others. To ensure my fish didn’t starve, I had to devise a scheme to trick the greedy menace. During feeding time, I outstretched my arms the full length of the tank, sprinkled a small amount of food at one end to draw the lionfish over, and then sprinkled a larger amount on the opposite side for the rest of the fish. However, one day the lionfish caught onto my game and noticed the feeding frenzy on the other side of the tank. It doubled back with its mouth gaping wide and its pectoral fins splayed out in a big threatening display, sending the rest of the fish fleeing. Any remaining food bits quickly ended up in its mouth.
Then, as if to punish me for my deception, it turned itself upside down and thrashed its tail at the surface, splashing water all over my face and nearly stinging my fingers with its venomous dorsal spines.
“What the hell!” I yelled as I wiped the water out of my eyes and beard. Being anywhere near Crystal when she didn’t get her way was a similarly dangerous place to be. If she didn’t get a modelling gig after an audition, she completely shut down for a week. Silence from someone almost never silent was more than just a little unnerving. I crept around her as though she were a sleeping guard dog that would attack anyone careless enough to wake it. One time, after growing tired of walking on eggshells around her, I tried to break through her sulking by asking if she wanted to talk about it.
“If someone told you to ‘come audition again after you’ve lost a little weight’, do you think you’d want to talk about it? Do you have any idea how much I already work out? Actually, I’m not sure why I’m asking you, since you clearly don’t seem to care about your weight.”
I instantly regretted ever bringing it up.
It was also around this time I started getting debilitating migraines that I’d never experienced before. They left me lying in a dark room for hours. When I finally went to get checked out by the doctor at Crystal’s order, I was told they were likely due to anxiety. I pleaded with the doctor to just give me some pills, but he advised that I first try to identify my triggers and medicate by doing things that calmed me down.
The first thing that came to mind were my fish. Although I hadn’t added a new one to my aquarium for a long time, I figured there had to be a species that could coexist with an aggressive lionfish and add new dynamism to my increasingly barren aquarium.
I drove straight to the fish store after my appointment and asked the manager for a recommendation, given my situation. After asking “Are you sure?” so many times he was on the verge of telling me to leave, I walked out of the store with a $100 baby barracuda.
When I arrived home, I released the new addition into the water, and held my breath. As expected, the lionfish swam right over to the newcomer and started chasing it. Luckily, the barracuda was too fast and easily outswam the bully until it got tired and lost interest. I exhaled, sat myself on the couch, and allowed myself to spend a few moments gazing at the aquarium.
I had forgotten just how therapeutic it was. The tension in my shoulders eased as I watched the anemones sway and admired the brilliant pink, teal, and orange corals. I watched it through the evening until my windows went black and the aquarium was the only light in the room. Eventually, it lulled me to sleep right there on my couch.
--
My cell phone alarm clanged. It was early. The sun was just beginning to show through my living room windows. I switched off the alarm and tried to rustle myself awake. Crystal and I were hosting some of her girlfriends for brunch at her place that morning, and I was supposed to have picked up the groceries the previous night. I groggily sat up on the couch, rubbed my eyes, and looked up at the aquarium.
What I saw jolted me wide awake.
The lionfish was staring back at me with the unmistakable silver tail of the barracuda protruding from its mouth. The captured fish was flapping and struggling for dear life. With one big gulp, the lionfish forced it into its mouth, and just like that, my newest aquatic friend was gone. The big white lips that curled around the lionfish’s face smiled mockingly at the horror in my eyes.
“You little bastard!” I screamed.
I ran over to the tank, opened the top, and swatted at it with a net. It stuck out its poisonous dorsal spines in defiance. I raged against the fearless thug until my energy was drained. I hurled the net against the wall, slumped back down onto the couch, and let out a primal scream into a pillow. Another searing migraine surged up through the back of my eyes and temples.
I spent the next half hour clasping my head and staring at the floor. Just as my breathing returned to normal and my headache began to subside, I realized I was late.
I shot up in a panic, threw on the nearest T-shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops, and then jumped into my car. There was no time to go to Crystal’s favorite organic grocery store. I only had time to speed to the nearest convenience store for brunch supplies. By the time I stumbled into her kitchen with the groceries, I was sweating and out of breath.
“Where have you been?” she started. “You look like hell.”
I ignored her jab, walked over to the counter, and started cracking eggs into a bowl, hoping that she’d just lay off me once I was busy at work.
No such luck. She walked right up to the counter next to me.
“What kind of eggs are these? Why would you ever buy eggs at a 7-11? I told you to go to Mom’s Organic Market.”
I grabbed a whisk and started beating the eggs at a rapid pace, praying that she’d just leave me alone to the preparations.
“Are you listening to me, Patrick? You smell. Have you even showered today? I’m not going to have you around my friends when you’re stinking of sweat and dressed like a bum.”
“For God’s sake! Can you please back off for one second? I just lost a $100 fish and have a migraine coming on!”
Bad idea. Her blue-green eyes widened with fury.
“Excuse me? You come in here late looking like you just rolled out of bed, my friends will be here any minute, and you have the nerve to snap at me because of something to do with your stupid fish tank?!”
“Stop calling it stupid!”
I couldn’t take it anymore. Once I talked back to her for the first time, there was no return. The dam burst, and months upon months of frustration came pouring out. She met it head on with a fiery tirade of her own. She said I was pathetic and immature. I said she was toxic and controlling. Fire met water in a screaming draw.
When her poor shocked girlfriends showed up to the verbal brawl, they pleaded with us to stop, but to no avail. Eventually, the situation became so awkward that they had to leave the house with empty stomachs.
Crystal and I continued our spiteful clash long after that, neither one of us ready to back down. An endless outpouring of pent-up anger and frustration filled the hours of the day. Insults and personal shots flew in every direction.
Finally, with mid-afternoon approaching and both of us losing steam, she demanded that I get out. I didn’t have to be told twice. I threw open the back door and marched out into the cool fall air, careful to make sure she didn’t see the tears welling up in my eyes as I left.
--
The paramedics came through my front door in blue uniforms and carrying a toolbox full of medical supplies. One was a dark-haired man, the other a blonde woman. Their shoes squished through the mushy carpet over to where I lay writhing in pain.
“Is this where it stung you?” the man asked as he leaned down to examine my swollen foot.
“Yes!”
I don’t know how there could have been any doubt about where the sting was. My entire leg had swollen to the size of a tree trunk and was just about as stiff. I was starting to feel dizzy from the toxins. The woman set her box of medical supplies down next to me and wrapped a cuff around my arm to take my blood pressure. She jammed two latex-covered fingers onto my pulsing neck and stuck a cold stethoscope down my shirt onto my chest hair.
“His vitals are stable. Shoot him with the EpiPen.” she said as she reached into her box of supplies and handed an EpiPen to the man.
I cringed as he lifted my dripping leg off the floor and rubbed my thigh with a sanitizing wipe. It was throbbing uncontrollably and felt like lava was flowing through it. I looked away as he stuck the needle in me. I was already in so much pain that I barely noticed.
Another paramedic came through my front door wheeling a stretcher.
“How bad is it? Am I going to be okay?”
“You’ll be fine,” the woman said flatly, lowering the stretcher beside me. “But we’re going to take you to the hospital to monitor you as a precaution.”
I would much rather have found a dark room to hide myself from the world in at that moment, but was in no place to argue. I went limp as two of them slipped their arms under my armpits and pulled my body onto the stretcher. They cranked it back up until I was lying at about waist height. Overwhelmed by pain and embarrassment, all I could do was gaze down vacantly at the semi-aquatic devastation on my living room floor. The blonde woman started tending to the glass wounds on my skin and pulling out the tiny shards.
Just then, the dark-haired man knelt down on the floor and lifted up the lionfish by its tail. Orange and white stripes glimmered on its slimy skin as it dangled from his hand. Through my tears and venom-induced stupor, I could almost see Crystal’s orangish blonde hair shining and waving back at me. The fish’s beady black eyes and big gaping mouth seemed to morph into her laughing face, as though mocking me even in death. I nearly forgot about the pain in my leg as a wave of anger flushed through me. Anger, as well as a bizarre new compulsion.
The dark-haired man held out a thick black plastic bag and drooped the lionfish over it.
“Stop! What are you going to do with that?!”
He looked up at me, surprised by my sudden outburst.
“It’s coming to the hospital so we know what type of animal poison we’re dealing with.”
“And then? What about after that?”
The man raised a baffled eyebrow. “And then... we’ll probably dispose of it.”
“No!”
All three paramedics looked at each other with bewildered expressions. Each one clearly indicated they thought I had lost my mind.
“Why not? What do you want to do with it?” he asked skeptically.
“Eat it!” I was overcome by an urge to devour the lionfish. Whether it was because I hadn’t eaten the entire day, or because I recently watched an episode of Blue Planet that highlighted a movement to control invasive species by encouraging people to eat them, I can’t be sure. But the lionfish was surely an invasive species; devastating vast marine ecosystems and home aquariums alike. There was just one species even more destructive, and it would have the last word.
I would filet the beautiful lionfish. I would discard its poisonous spines. I would absorb all the misery and cruelty in its flesh. And then I would expel it from my body, emerging nourished and wiser from the ordeal.
After that, I had a new aquarium to build.
THE END