Go, Fish

Your stupid fish got sick. I woke up one afternoon to feed Winston some breakfast when I realized that she was lingering on the bottom of her bowl, her belly kissing the aquarium pebbles. Her dinner flakes were still littering the surface of the water. 

I blinked at her limp body and wracked my sleep-addled brain. Was she like that last night? When was the last time that I actually looked at her? How could I not have noticed something was off? You knew that I hated that damned fish, that sentient potato, the object of your undying affection. Winston was the stupidest inheritance; your mother bequeathing her to me felt like she was my consolation prize for watching you die. And now my consolation prize was ill.

I tapped on the glass trying to stir her. She barely moved. Guilt scooped at my stomach. You flashed into my mind. Dude, I’ve been gone nine weeks and you already killed my fish????

I shook my head to dislodge your voice from my brain. I got up to get a better look into her tank. Her eyes were bulged and her little lips were agape, like she was gasping. I shakily tapped her symptoms into my phone. Google confirmed my fears, and my stress curdled into panic. 

I shook Mom awake. She fell asleep on the couch again, still wearing her scrubs from the night shift. She shot up and gasped like I’d shocked her, grabbing for my hand.

“What happened? What’s wrong?” she said.

“She needs a vet.”

“What?”

“Winston’s sick.”

Mom took a deep breath, her distress at being woken up subsiding into irritation. She scrubbed at her eyes with her palms and smeared her mascara down her cheeks. “Normal vets don’t see fish. Fishes are a specialty thing.”

“Well, we need to find a specialist then,” I said.

Mom took her time getting up and began limping to the kitchen to make her coffee. I followed her, almost stepping on her heels. I watched in agony as she mulled over the effort of making a pot of coffee and opted to crack open an energy drink instead. Every second of silence meant that we were wasting time. I forced myself to take a deep breath. Mom turned around and jumped, unaware how closely I had been following her. “Hon,” she said slowly, “Specialty vets are really expensive-”

“I think Winston has dropsy-”

“-Honey-”

“-Dropsy is indicative of either a parasitic infection or internal organ failure-” I began reciting the web page that I pored over that morning, my voice got louder as I continued- “She’s going to die if she doesn’t get looked at. She can’t die.”

Mom sighed and scratched her scalp. I smacked my palm on the table to get her to catch my eye. “Mother,” I said, “Winston. Cannot. Die.”

I spooked Mom enough to begin looking up exotic vets in our area and we were sitting in a smelly waiting room only a couple of hours later. I chewed on my fingernails and flicked through Dr. Long’s reviews. They were overwhelmingly positive, and one of the pictures on her website was her posing with a frog. I thought you would have approved of my choice.

Dr. Long ordered a slew of tests. She took a sample from the water in Winston’s transport bag, scraped goo from her scales, and performed an ultrasound on her clammy body. Mom couldn’t help but grumble about how the vet visit for a five dollar fish was going to cost as much as our rent, but I ignored her. It didn’t matter the cost. I knew without a doubt that you would have done whatever you could for Winston, and so I had to too.

You found Winston at Petland when you came to visit me at work. You hated the concept of pet stores, they made you cry. You loved creatures more than people, and the idea of seeing them behind glass up for sale was too much for your sweet soul to take. But at the same time, you liked going to places that hurt your feelings. I never understood it, but it centered you in some weird way; like poking a bruise on your leg just to feel something. 

Winston was the fattest goldfish in the tank. She had a bulbous forehead that flopped over her vacant eyes. Her orange scales faded to white down the length of her body. You named her after the British prime minister because of the way her jowls puffed up and deflated, like she was trying to speak to you. You kept looking at her in her plastic bag and you laughed, delighted at saving the goofiest creature in existence from a life of sadness. 

Something about Winston just pissed me off. I guess I didn't like how much you loved her, how much you talked about her, like you two had inside jokes I'd never learn. I always knew how ridiculous it sounded. I was aware that my jealousy over a fish was something I’d probably have to unpack with a therapist in my twenties. Regardless, you thought my rivalry with Winston was funny. But now you’re gone, and I’m responsible for the well being of my nemesis. My girlfriend died and all I got was her weird, diseased fish. 

Dr. Long confirmed my fears, Winston had dropsy. It was possibly due to organ failure, though her lab results wouldn’t be available for a day or so. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I never thought about Winston having organs. I imagined her kidneys the size of pencil erasers, shriveling and curling up inside of her. I thought of you, your body small and frail like Winston’s. I swallowed hard. “What can we do to make her better?” I asked.

Dr. Long removed her glasses and placed them on the top of her head. “Unfortunately there’s not much we can do for her, her scales are already pineconing, which is a sign that she’s been struggling for awhile” she says.

The words were heavy and landed like closed fists against my chest. “She is-well, was- my girlfriend’s fish,” I said uselessly.

 Dr. Long crossed her arms and tilted her head. A lot of adults had been looking at me like that since you died. Anger welled behind my eyes and I blinked it away rapidly. I stared down at Winston. She stared back. 

“I assume your girlfriend bought Winston at a pet store?” Dr. Long asked. 

I nodded. “That makes sense,” she continued, “Fish bought at retail stores are usually worse for wear by the time they’re purchased. There’s no telling how long she may have had an underlying condition…There are a lot of elements at play here. She’s probably been battling this illness for quite awhile.”

Mom reached for me and squeezed my hand. “You did your best,” she said.

I yanked my arm away. Letting her touch me felt like acceptance, or defeat. “What can I do to give her the best chance of survival?” I asked.

Dr. Long set her mouth in a thin line. “I hate to keep being the bearer of bad news, but the chances of survival for a fish showing signs of dropsy is less than twenty percent.”

“That’s not zero.”

Dr. Long’s gaze flitted to Mom and back to me. “There is the slightest chance that, with a lot of intervention, she could surprise me. But, really, we have to consider what her quality of life is looking like right now, and I still believe that the best course of action would be to euthanize-” 

I waved her words out of the air and snatched Winston’s tank away from the Grim Reaper’s expert fingers. “‘kay thanks, I’m going to try and keep her alive though.”

I could tell how ridiculous I was being, but I felt that if I just pushed hard enough I could change Winston’s fate. On some level, I was trying to help Winston because I couldn’t help you, but I refused to allow myself to think about the implications back then. Or, maybe, I’d just gone nuts. Mom thought so, given the sidelong looks she shot at me in the car. But I think you would be proud of me for how quickly I became a goldfish expert. On the way home from the vet appointment I began thoroughly researching. One Redditor on a post from eight years prior bragged of their success story, having cured their fish from a parasitic infection after discovering his late-stage dropsy. It bolstered me with enough delirious hope to get me to bike the three miles to the aquarium store and spend my last paycheck on rehabilitation supplies. 

I bought Winston a proper rectangular tank and a separate smaller “hospital tank” to soak her in an epsom salt bath. I switched her to a fancy brand of fish flakes that toted organic ingredients and I dosed it with vitamin supplements, though she still refused to eat. Dropsy was causing her to bloat, so I started manually expressing her fluid build up, squeezing her gently and letting the liquid drip down the bathroom sink. I set my alarm to go off every two hours just to make sure that she was still alive. Not that I needed it; I barely slept at all that weekend. By Sunday night my eyes were so dry they felt like they were bleeding whenever I blinked. I was fully engulfed in my obsession. I couldn’t not think about Winston, which meant that I couldn’t not think about you. 

When your cancer finally chewed through your body and stopped your heart, I wasn’t allowed in the hospital. I couldn’t go to your funeral either. Your mom was Baptist, and she didn’t like the purple tips in my hair, or my nose ring, or the fact that her dying daughter liked girls. I spent months refusing to think about any of it, the miserable circus that was my life that spring, but it was all I could think of now that I was at risk of losing Winston too. 

That following Monday, Winston was still alive. Though she wasn’t getting better she didn’t seem to be getting any worse. Mom went to work early, leaving me to my thoughts. I decided to busy myself by boiling and blanching peas, hoping to entice Winston to eat by haggling with a healthy snack. I went down a rabbit hole watching videos about cleaning fish tanks. Turns out there is a whole subsection of the internet dedicated to maintaining and caring for pet fish. Maybe I’d become a crazy fish lady in your honor. I thought about having walls of tanks filled with Koi and Betas and one of those little sharks that some mobsters have in movies.

Lainey showed up unannounced later that day. She laid beside me and watched as I shelled pea pods into a bowl cradled in my lap. “You haven’t been at school much. I wanted to check in on you,” she said.

“I’m fine, Winston’s not,” I said. 

We both eyed Winston across the room. Though she was still alive, her poop that morning was white and snotty, which made me spiral wondering what healthy fish poop was supposed to look like. I told Lainey as much.

“Do you want to talk about why you’re doing all of this….For a fish?” Lainey asked.

“It’s not just any fish, it’s Winston.” I say it slowly, like, duh, genius. 

Lainey looked at me like I sprouted another head. You didn’t like Lainey very much; you didn’t like how she snapped her gum and liked to act like she was more of an adult than the rest of us because she was the first to grow boobs. You always rolled your eyes at her when she tried playing therapist. I think about the face you’d make if you saw us right now, with your eyebrows furrowed and your mouth slanted in irritation. Lainey interrupted my thoughts by placing her hand on my leg.

“Babes, I think you gotta let the fish go,” she said.

I stood up. I wanted to open-palm smack her between her eyes. “Her name is Winston. Stop acting like you don’t know that. You know how important she is.”

Lainey looked around the room. Over the course of the last few days my bedroom started to look more like the storage shack of an aquarium store. Instruction pamphlets, cardboard from packaging, and tank-enrichment figures littered every surface. My dinner from the night before was discarded on the floor, untouched. The carpet was damp. I realized when I looked around that the sun had gone down and I had been sitting in the dark with my laptop’s screen as the only light source. “You’re spiraling, babe,” she said.

I kneaded my fist into my thigh. “I think you need to go. Winston’s going to need to be expressed again.”

Lainey sighed. “I don’t want to know what that means.” 

Before leaving, she lingered in the doorway and flicked her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t think she would want you sitting around wasting away like this. She would want you to move on.”

“You don’t know what she would have wanted,” I yelled after her.

I was alone again. I blinked at Winston. She blinked past me, wheezing. Lainey and our friends didn’t understand. How could they? They didn’t get the pieces of you that you gave me. They didn’t feel the loss like I did. Winston and I were all that was left of you, what you loved. I listened to Lainey’s footsteps clomp down my stairs and out the front door. Shortly after, Dr. Long called me. Winston’s blood tests were back; she was in organ failure. There was nothing I could do. 

Winston died the next morning. Her body was belly up in the tank, gently rocked by the oxygen filter breaking the surface of the water. Yes, I cried. I cried for Winston. I cried for you. I cried for myself. Mom rocked me like I was a baby again and petted my hair and told me I did the best I could. It was all just so unfair.

I finally visited your grave. Mom and I buried Winston in a jewelry box we picked out at a thrift store. It was bejeweled and kind of ugly, something you’d like. We dug a bit and placed her around where I thought your head would be. Your mom had you buried, not burned. You would’ve hated that. 

I don’t like praying, but I thought about you really hard, which is maybe sort of like a prayer. Our friends showed up, even Lainey. They roasted me for wearing a widow’s veil and we joked about you and your love for the stupidest looking fish in existence. I sank to the ground and kissed the dirt and seasoned it with my tears. I allowed myself to poke the bruise, and it hurt so good.