killers on the kitchen counter
tell me have you ever really really really ever loved a goldfish?
They say don’t write from the wound, but I can’t wait forever. Our goldfish is dead. You think I’m being glib, but I’m wrecked.
SpongeBob came home from the carnie bottle toss in May of ‘22. He outlived two fragile companions and spent his first year in a flower vase on the kitchen counter eating the occasional saltine. I was not enthusiastic about having fish—though I was smugly proud to have won them—and my disinterest is a humbling regret.
We had a mythology, me and the goldfish. It started one day when I came home, heavily pregnant, to my mother playing Uno with the boys.
“Mom!” Augie shouted. “SpongeBob is dying!”
I went to the vase and nearly squashed him. He lay on the kitchen floor, half desiccated. I scraped him up with a spatula and plopped him back in the clouded cracker water.
“Mom,” I said, continuing the cycle of neediness and blame. “Did you not notice the goldfish?”
“I wondered why there was a piece of sushi on the floor!”
Mom and I… we eat at different places.
After that, I committed. I bought real food and a tank with a top and a bubbling filter and you’ve never seen a fish as ecstatic as one who’s lived in a fetid flower jar, flung himself into oblivion, dried out, and been rehydrated. SpongeBob became—Louis Zamperini.
Zamperini had feelings. Big enthusiasms. Every morning he’d greet me in his tank by the coffee pot, puckering his mouth, nudging me to the jar of insect flakes. I spent many nights pacing the kitchen when Bruce was a baby and Zamperini was always with us, bumping his plastic wall, mirroring our path. He tripled in size. What a chum.
It was Bruce, honestly, who made this fish so special. Zamperini saw the whole spectrum of me ballooning and deflating through pregnancy and birth. I went into labor at my mom’s summer place—woke up soaked, packed the car to meet the midwives at home. It was dark and we let the kids sleep, figuring we’d get them back somehow, later. But we brought the fish. He sat on my lap, our worlds rocked by every bump and turn. His water swished and mine leaked. What monster wouldn’t make the connection?
This fish was my baby.
The carnival came back this May, as it always does. There was a bottle toss. I told the boys no. I did not want another goldfish—my heart was full with Zamperini.
One evening, Christopher and I had a great idea: we asked our sitter to take the kids to the fair, but I forgot to communicate the moratorium. Max came home, grinning with winnings: two watery bags from the bottle toss.
What the Hell, Zamperini deserves friends. Unthinking, I dropped them in with my beloved. One fish was grey, the other insane. His scales were mottled and he liked to drift perpendicular to the surface, getting sucked a little into the filter. A real freak.
Three days later, I noticed Zamperini lingering behind the SpongeBob pineapple playhouse. I pulled the thing out so I could get a better look and stumbled back in horror. His mouth was red and his lips had begun dissolving like the flaking crackers of yore.
By the time I came back from school drop-off, Zamperini drifted sideways like a scrap of pale confetti in a listless wind. I called the vet. They directed me to Birds and Exotics. I called Birds and Exotics, asked if they could save my goldfish… and they laughed.
We buried Zamperini under the sugar maple that afternoon. I’d warned the kids he might not make it through the day, and Clyde had made a sculpture at art class, which we lay, temporarily, over the grave. I felt nauseated—bruised on the inside. The remorse lingers, especially when I get my coffee and feed Zamperini’s killers. The spotty sketch-ball came with parasites, I’m certain.
Anyway, he died a day later. We threw him in the compost. The grey fish lives, but he doesn’t greet me in the morning. He’ll never know that I can become pregnant and bring forth new life. He’ll never keep me company at the 4am shift or know the hardship of a stagnant flower vase. We have no mythology, no war stories, no love.
I type this while eating a tuna sandwich.
It’s awful how easily and hypocritically we humans become attached. It’s barbaric how we compartmentalize. It fascinates me how love develops wherever attention goes. I didn’t do much for this fish beyond scrubbing his tank once a week (if that) and feeding him every morning, but evidently, it was enough to project my whole heart.
Zamperini was a two inch, cold-blooded slip, but his absence is a real wound. I can’t even fathom what this portends for the dog.
xx Isabel
If you care to, I’d love to know about your weirdest, most unexpected love. It might help. With the grief.
OMG I LOVE this one, which made me laugh, and shudder, too, remembering the death of our goldfish, Joe:
“Flush it,” my four-year-old son said, and so, with a minimum of discussion, we buried our little pet. It wasn’t much of a ceremony, “flush it” being the entire requiem, but he was our fish and we loved him.
Maybe loved is too strong a word.
For that matter, maybe pet is too strong a word.
We bought Joe, a regular kinda goldfish, at Woolworth’s, for a quarter. I had some intimations of mortality—Joe’s mortality, to be exact—when I realized that a goldfish was about the cheapest thing you could buy at Woolworth’s. But my son had dropped so many hints about getting a pet—barking instead of talking when I asked him a question, pretending to eat his dinner off a dish on the floor the way a dog would—that I decided we should give it a try.
Since I don’t believe God made animals to live in city apartments, a fish seemed a good way to get our feet wet in the pet department. My son’s excitement fizzled when he realized that we were buying a goldfish, and not, as he had strongly suggested, a dolphin. But he dutifully carried Joe in a wet plastic bag the five blocks from the store to our house. In typical four-year-old style, he swung the bag around his head a few times to give Joe a thrill, or to kill him. To my astonishment, Joe did not die. I realized that in my head I was doing a kind of death check: Block three, not dead yet. Home, not dead yet. Into bowl, still not dead. Fed, not dead.
I began to root for the little guy. He was in a pretty small bowl, so we got him some bottled water to swim around in. We got him a little plant to spruce his place up and a tiny container of goldfish gourmet takeout. Every morning as soon as I woke up I rushed out of the bedroom to see if Joe was still alive. (I hesitate to point out—but in the service of honesty, I will—that I did the same thing with my son for the first three years. It amazes me that he survived, even flourished, despite my efforts at raising him. I felt the same way about Joe, though it was harder to make eye contact.)
It may have been Joe’s passive nature that turned off my son, but whatever it was, he quickly lost interest. Since I had no intention of ever moving up to a dog or a cat, I took this as a good sign: He would probably lose interest in any pet sooner or later. I felt less guilty about not getting him a real one. And I didn’t mind having to be responsible for the fish. I thought it would be easy.
For a while it was easy, though both my husband and son regarded me with disgust and suspicion whenever I spoke to Joe. Disgust, because neither could imagine why I would talk to a fish, and suspicion, because my husband surely thought that my involvement with Joe had something to do with my desire to have another baby, as in it starts with a fish, and the next thing you know….
And then, we got the chance to spend summer weekends away from the city. I was thrilled. But what would I do with Joe?
A generous neighbor offered to feed Joe during our first weekend away. But fate dealt us a heavy blow: The elevator in the building we live in broke, and she couldn’t get onto our floor.
Sometime on that humid July weekend Joe died—by his own fin, for all I know. It must have been hot up there, and lonely, and I also forgot to tell him if we were ever coming back.
“Poor Joe,” I said, when I found him floating on his side in his bowl. But I was unprepared for the shudder I felt when, for his final journey, I scooped his limp little fish body into the net. Though only the size of a peapod, he was heavy with the weight of neglect.
“Poor Joe,” I said again, really meaning it this time. I suspect that my son’s insistence on the quickest of ceremonies had something to do with the sadness he heard in my voice. Though there may be little pets, there is no such thing, I discovered, as a little death.
"One fish was grey, the other insane." I really love that sentence.
Our ancient dog Dinah died about a month ago. Or to be more precise, we paid for a service where a vet and her assistant come to your house and kill your dog in your living room. I noticed that the vet pulled up in an Audi (it's dawning on me that I should probably write about this, haha). They fed her a fast-food hamburger to distract her while they did the deed. I don't know if it was from McDonald's, or Wendy's, or what. When they took her away, it was on a dog-sized stretcher, and they tucked a blanket in around her but kept her head exposed. Holy holy shit. They put Dinah's carcass in the back of the Audi and drove away. My husband David's grief was immediate and loud, and maybe for that reason, mine was somewhat delayed. She was an intense personality: beautiful, difficult, hilarious. As one friend put it, "the one, the only".