Two Inches
Dean Hel
I noticed when the water reached two inches. Or maybe I only remember it like that. The image I can conjure up from that time is the way the water looked: two inches of dark-green viscous liquid, and the fish with their mouths sealed to the glass.
They’re supposed to eat the bacteria, these fish. They have suction mouths and they latch onto the glass and you can trace their long bellies with a finger. They like to hold onto something.
By then the aquarium was dark, of course. It made no sense to turn on the overhead light onto the dying fish. The aquarium sat in the corner of the living room. The rich dark wood of its frame matched the coffee table and the bookshelves to perfection. I liked how its blue-green light used to paint the ultra modern black and white minimalist furniture of the living room. Although we lived all my life in social housing, we always had real leather couches and the kind of lamps that look like sculptures because mom worked for a high-end design furniture store and got the display models for almost nothing.
As a kid, I loved going to work with her. I played house in the different model rooms. In a sleek Scandinavian teak-wood living room, I sat on a veal leather couch, knocking back my cup of business-office hot chocolate like a glass of stiff whiskey and wondering when I’d be allowed to care only for myself. In a Texas-ranch dining room with a soft cowhide spread on the floor, I stood by the oak-tree slice table and gripped an imaginary cigarette, thinking about putting my head in the gas oven instead of the pork roast.
In our real living room, the last fish held onto life. Or maybe it had already died, its lips permanently sealed to the glass by a lack of oxygen in the water or something. It was hard to tell. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about fish. I did wonder when mom had stopped cleaning or refilling the water. It must have happened some time ago, but I either didn’t see it or didn’t care.
I could hardly cast blame. As an 8 or 9 year-old I had myself condemned a much-desired pet rabbit to a brutal and senseless death by releasing it into the wild. (The wild being the empty parking lot behind our building where Roma people sometimes set up camp. They had big mutts on chain-link leashes that would have made a good snack out of Princess Whiskers.) She gnawed at the bars of her cage all night and it prevented me from sleeping.
It never occurred to me to refill the water of the aquarium. It was her aquarium. Every day, I came home from school and looked at the surviving fish, which in time had to lie horizontally in the last two inches of the water, its dark-gray skin barely distinguishable in the muck. It was the second best time to be around mom. The first was first thing in the morning, when she was awake. She slept every night on the couch with the TV on. When she was awake we’d watch a German soap together while I ate a bowl of cereal. Dan, her husband, would have gone to work hours ago. He was a truck driver and woke up at 3 a.m. It’d be just the two of us then.
After school, he’d be back, a silent, awkward presence, like a pensioner at an old-timey boarding house. But it would still be good even then, because mom would have just woken up from her nap on the couch but would have yet to pour herself the first drink. We’d sit and watch an American soap.
In these moments there was no space to ask about the fish, so I didn’t.
I can’t remember what happened to that last, valiant fish. I see it at the bottom, the round O of its mouth on the glass, and then the aquarium is gone like a magician’s trick. A collection of encyclopedias Britannica replaced it on the shelves. What was the last straw, I wonder? Did mom wait until it floated on the miserable surface belly up? Or did she finally take pity and throw it in the toilet bowl with the disintegrated bits of its former comrades?
But now that I think on it–how did it survive in the first place, all this time, weeks or months, without food? Was it always dead, or did someone–but who? Certainly not Dan, who I never saw even glance at the aquarium–feed it contraband on the down low? Is it possible to both let something die and continue to feed it?
Let me rewrite the script of who I was then: I refill the water. I feed the fish. I give it to someone who properly cares for it, acting covertly, waiting for mom to go grocery shopping to smuggle the fish out of the house. I become an American soap teenager, doing the right thing in the face of neglect. Montage scene of me running to my friends’ car with the fish in a bag, cut to the empty, lit aquarium, a silent accusation, back to us in a car, smirking, a beautiful girl in the backseat screaming with her head tilted back. Cue the intro to “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.”
In the car, I hold the fish. I look through the window, outward, mouth set, eyes shiny. I go forward not being mom at all. The fish is going to be just fine. Where we’re going, you can swim all you want; you don’t have to hold on.
THE END
Author Bio: Dean Hel is a writer based in Houston, Texas. They are currently at work on a novel. Send missives to dean.hel.writer@gmail.com.