The Private Nature of Terminal Fish

Recently my family and I packed up the van and embarked on the classic family vacation. It involved a long car trip punctuated by frequent parental admonishments of both siblings for copying, staring, and otherwise annoying the other. The repertoire of parental threats to the back seat has changed quite a bit since my parents threatened to "turn this car around and head straight home" so many years ago. Today's parental threats include restricting access to gaming consoles, turning off the DVD player, withholding toys from the kids’ meal. Despite the occasional sibling fight in the back seat, we managed to make it to our vacation destination and have an enjoyable time in the company of oversized licensed cartoon characters. But like all good things our vacation had to come to an end, so we bid our new cartoon friends farewell, piled back onto the van and drove home. Thankfully everyone slept most of the way back.

There are three things you should expect to find when returning home from a long trip. The first is a pile of unwanted newspapers on the front step. Even if you canceled the daily paper, your front walk will still be subjected to the bombardment of free weekly papers. These gypsy papers (which are 90% ads) just show up unannounced and litter the front walk, yet you can't be bothered to stop the delivery since it isn't costing you anything to throw then away each week. The second is the carton containing a solidified chunk of milk in the fridge that smells like extract of monkey foot. Even though the carton walls are puffed out and even though you can see curdles through the translucent plastic jug, you'll still pull the cap off and give it a whiff. The last item you can expect to find upon returning home is dead fish. Assuming you have an aquarium, of course; if you don’t, I imagine finding dead fish at home would be quite a surprise.

Fish are either really shy or really private when time comes to meet the reaper because you'll rarely catch one in the act of dying. I've attended or resided over at least 50 toilet bowl ceremonies over the years and in every case the death either happened overnight or while the house was empty. Oh, I've seen a few fish that were swimming upside down or sideways, but every time I came over to investigate (I.e. tap my finger against the glass), the fish right themselves and swim away, embarrassed that they were almost caught in the act of dying.

So upon the evening of our return home, I wasn't surprised when my youngest daughter went upstairs and discovered that one of her fish had shed its corporeal scales and joined the choir invisible. Even though she had named them we're still not sure which fish died since they looked practically identical; that and their collars kept falling off due to fish not having necks. We paused from the process of unloading the van for a brief ceremony around the toilet to honor our fallen pet.

It wasn't until the next morning that the true surprise came. That morning my daughter bounded happily down the stairs talking excitedly about small fish. I didn’t make much of it at the time; after all we’d just spent the week surrounded ginormous costumed characters, so my first thought was her imagination was still on overload. I responded with the natural parental response when a young child is speaking nonsense, which is to say "That's nice dear" and move on. But she never did; she kept talking about seeing small fish. Finally I ventured upstairs to see what she was talking about.

I saw them. The tiny fish. In her aquarium. Two of them to be exact. Apparently one of her fish laid eggs while we were on vacation (which one we'll never know), so even with the death we experienced a net gain of one fish upon returning from vacation.

It's been about two weeks since we've returned from vacation and the diminutive fishies are still alive. We have no plans for travel in the coming months so unless they plan offing themselves in the night we're stuck with the extra fish for the foreseeable future. The two little fish seem to be getting along fine, but if they start fighting we’re taking the treasure chest out of the aquarium until they agree to behave.