A Face Only a Mother Could Love

When I got my first aquarium, I filled it with a variety of fishes, shrimps, plants, and rocks. I was over the moon. My nose pressed to the glass, I watched the tiny blue guppies chase the zippy tetra along the surface, while the bright red shrimp made friends with the cory catfish on the tank floor. I faithfully dropped in the smelly pale flakes daily. The filter circulated the gurgling water predictably. Time moved only as quickly as the lazy, waving fronds of the Java ferns and mosses. All was right with the world.

The guppies quickly got to work making babies. To my dismay, when the hatchlings appeared, the new parents took to eating their offspring. I pleaded to have another tank, for the fry. It would go in the family room, since I had no where else to keep it. I would surely clean it every day. This was arranged, and very soon, all the tiny guppies were happily flitting around in their own wide, safe world— far away from their hungry moms and dads.

I sprinkled the fishy flakes into both tanks, every day at first. One day, though, I forgot, and didn’t notice until the guppy fry resorted to cannibalizing their brothers and sisters. I was distraught and hurt. These animals were my responsibility and I had let them down. Frantically, my eyes growing hot, I began scooping up the bigger fry in a water glass, spilling some water, and some fish, on the floor. After the clean up, I poured half of the little guys into a large pitcher and set them on my nightstand. They had room to swim and to escape from each other, and I could breathe. Everyone was safe for now.

The days were seeming shorter and shorter. Every morning, as I shuffled books and papers into my backpack and tied my shoes, I checked on the little fish in their habitats. Some were looking sad. Some floated slowly to the surface of the water, their gills still moving in silence, before suddenly gaining inspiration and swimming back to the watery side of life. The red shrimp had gone missing. But I had to eat my cereal before the bus arrived. I had time neither to notice nor to care that algae and duck weed were growing in my beautiful tanks. Still, I loved the guppies and the tetra and the cory dearly, and worried over them like a hen worries for her chicks.

One day, I got home from school and all the fish were belly-up. Since I had been too busy with homework to remember my fish, my little sister had been employed to feed them, and had done her duty liberally. The poor things smothered in their own greasy, goopy dinner. I cried big tears and choked on my disappointment in the proper decorum of a grieving mother.

Wonderfully, one lazy afternoon, I came home to find a spacious, clean fishbowl on my nightstand. It was tastelessly and lovingly filled with neon gravel. It housed a plastic pirate ship, and one tiny, ugly, angry, emerald green betta fish. My affection for him was immediate, and I now feed him every single day. It is a very simple task to keep his bowl clean.