The Fish Who Couldn't Swim

Ms. Szymanski, sixth grade English teacher, had a fish tank, and about halfway through October, she finally got around to filling it with fish.

We all had her for homeroom. Most of my friends had last names beginning with R or S, so we were lucky that way.

We all decided to adopt a fish. My friend Scott Rimmer chose a bright orange one with brown spots on both sides. He named it Rimmer.

A word about Scott. He has been my friend since kindergarten, and had we not become friends way back then, we probably would have disliked each other intensely. As it happened, both of us grew up small—he a little smaller and malnourished because of a long list of allergies—and both of us were picked on by older kids on the bus. I responded by developing a wit and earned respect that way; he just kept retreating inward and inward and inward. By sixth grade, he was proudly unpopular and defiantly antagonistic towards everyone but the few of us he trusted. So he was teased mercilessly and he had a lot of enemies, and then there were a lot of people who didn’t consider him an enemy but were a little disgusted by him, and his indifference and even hostility towards making friends. Even I made fun of him a lot, in a friendly way. If I had to say it in one word, I would call him a loser, but I didn’t want to say that right out because it is more complicated than that and he is my friend.

Anyway, like I said, my friend Scott Rimmer chose a bright orange one with brown spots on both sides and he named it Rimmer. Scott was proud of his little fish, which was by far the most active in the little tank, darting around, back and forth across the tank while all the others were just chilling out and getting acquainted. Dan picked a fish that was jet black with fins like streamers coming out of his back, naming him “Dan.” Chris “Curly” Rioux picked a skinny silver thing with two black stripes like a zebra on each side. There was only one fish left for me to claim, so I took another skinny silver thing like Curly, but with only one black stripe, and I named him “Shrimp,” which was my nickname at the time.

--

I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself God I hate myself God I hate myself God I hate myself. I’ve had it. I’ve had it. I’ve. Had. It. I can’t anymore. I can’t. I hate myself.

I am a disgusting insignificant nothing of a being in this clusterfuck of a world. Who am I? Who am I? Who will remember me when I’m dead? No one.

Who am I kidding. That’s a comforting thought, if anything. When I die—hopefully soon—I want every trace of me flushed off this fucking planet. I don’t want anyone to know me. I am embarrassed by familiarity. I want to go someplace new every day, so that I never see the same thing twice, and nothing I see ever knows me, so I can pretend to be something less than a fucking stain on this fucking planet.

I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself.

If there were only a way to die, I would take it. I would not even hesitate. I don’t care who I would have to take out with me. I just want to die. I know there is no God, but I am going to pray anyway, because the hatred I have for the great Lack in the sky is comforting. I want to die. I want to die. LET ME DIE. LET. ME. DIE.

I will hide under here, and I will wait for myself to die. I will stop trying to live. I am simple, after all. There must be a way around all this. There must be a way around and I will stop trying to live and I will no longer live. I will no longer live.

Yes.

--

The day after we all named our fishes, we came into school and noticed that something was wrong with the fish named Rimmer. He wasn’t swimming anywhere. He was just sulking under a shell. We watched him all morning and besides his mouth opening and closing, he didn’t move once. Everyone else was swimming around like usual, but Rimmer just sat down there, even when Ms. Szymanski sprinkled some food on the top of the tank.

It was obvious that something was wrong with the fish named Rimmer. The very day after he had been christened, he had ceased to be himself. The once vibrant, flamboyant, fun-loving fish was now a dead little husk of what he had been.

Three days later, Rimmer was nowhere to be found in the little tank.

Where did the orange fish go? Scott asked Ms. Szymanski.

He got sick and died, she said.

At first, we were all stunned. But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense. The fish, after being named Rimmer, had immediately lost the will to live. Staring up at his awkward namesake, he decided that the sweet release of death was preferable to life in the shadow of our friend Scott. The fish, we decided, had found a way to effectively shut down his immune system, allowing himself to be overtaken by the icy hand of the Grim Reaper. For the little orange fish, the nothingness of nonexistence was preferable to a long, cruel life as a Rimmer.

We all found this conclusion to be quite smart, but Scott didn’t take it so well. He just scowled.

--

I don’t like it here. I don’t like it here at all, and I don’t think anyone does, even the ones who were already here. I can tell. I can see it in their faces. This is not a good place.

It smells of death. Everything reeks of death. There is death everywhere here.

I can’t stay still. I feel like there is always something behind me. It is all in my mind. It is death.

It is impossible to be happy here. It all feels insecure. Unstable. If I stay still too long, I panic. It is death.

It is death, and it is here, and only here. Is this where death began? Unlikely. But possible. It feels like it. I never had these feelings until I came here, and then I felt it the second I arrived. It is death.

I am tired. I want to keep moving but I can't help it.

--

To fill the space left by Rimmer, Ms. Szymanski bought some more fish and filled the tank again. Scott wanted to adopt one of the new ones, but we begged him not too, for the fish’s sake. He scowled.

Within a week, one of the unnamed fish began dying. It became lethargic. When Ms. Szymanski would feed the tank, the dying little fish would flap his fins as hard as he could, but he stayed at the bottom, floating from side to side but never up. The fish couldn’t swim. We were sure this was a metaphor for something, but couldn't put it together.

It wasn’t long before the fish who couldn’t swim died, but by then another unnamed fish had caught whatever the first one had. Dan suggested that it was a contagious disease that Rimmer had brought to the tank by opening his body to whatever virus might be bubbling in the tank’s murky waters. In his rush to end his life, Rimmer had unleashed a plague upon Ms. Szymanski’s fish tank, and where he was now, I’m sure he didn’t care.

--

My babies. They’re my babies.

Why are they being kept from me? I just want to see them. I can see them, of course. I want to feel them. I want to feel my babies.

Little pieces were taken out of me, and there they are, just out of my reach, no matter what I do. I can see them from here but I cannot touch them, for whatever reason, because someone doesn’t want me to touch them. But I don’t want to touch them. I just want to feel them, and I want to take them back, because they are mine, and they are me.

It is not fair. It is not fair of them to take them away from me, because they were just a part of me, just now, and then they all fell off, and they were dragged away. I want them inside of me again, where they came from, because that’s when we were all together, when it made sense to all of us, when we weren’t fragmented and separate and lost like we are now. I will open my mouth and let them all back in, and they will all come to me because that’s the way we were when we were together and we felt love.

Ever since they left I feel so tired.

--

Ms. Szymanski diagnosed the fish with the “ick,” which was, she said, a disease that often afflicted large tanks. We thought she made it up, because no scientist would ever name a disease “ick.” What a cruel joke.

But that’s what Ms. Szymanski said it was, and she told us there wasn’t much that anyone could do. She bought some fancy kind of fish food that was said to build immune systems, but we all doubted that it would work, if only because Ms. Szymanski seemed to care so little for the fish that we couldn’t imagine that she would go out of her way to purchase expensive food. Beyond that, she said, there was nothing we could do but hope that the fish wouldn’t die, one by one by one until the tank was empty but for whatever death left behind in the cloudy water.

Dan had babies. Not our friend Dan, of course, but his fish, which was apparently female. Ms. Szymanski sighed and collected Dan and her baby fish in little separate plastic baggies that she left open and floating at the top of the tank. But the fish couldn’t get out, which was the important thing, because we were told that Dan would have eaten her babies at the first opportunity. What a strange thing, we all thought, to go through all that trouble of procreation and childbirth—the meaning of your species—and then be so anxious to destroy it that everyone involved in it had to be kept apart.

In the baggies, Dan and all her babies looked lethargic, and at first we just thought it was because they didn’t have much room to swim, but our minds changed when all of them died.

--

JUST THE TWO OF US PAAAAALLLLSSS!

JUST TWO LITTLE PALS, SWIMMING AROUND! / NO ONE AND NOTHING GETTING IN OUR WAY! / I THINK I’LL SWIM AROUND NEXT TO MY OLD PAL! / I THINK I’LL SWIM OVER HERE TODAY!

CUZ WE’RE PAAAAAALLLLLSSS! / JUST TWO OF US PALS, / THE WAY IT WAS SUPPOOOOSSED TO BEEEEEEEEE!!!!

PALS, FOREVER, / WE’LL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER! / NO ONE HERE TO KEEP US APART! / PALS, FOREVER, / WE’RE TWO BIRDS OF A FEATHER, / NOW LET’S TAKE IT ONE MORE TIME FROM THE START!

OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH…

--

Rimmer’s plague killed them all, except for Shrimp and Curly, who were apparently of a different and stronger species. They were almost identical in appearance, and something in them helped keep the ick at bay. Scott even postulated that it was them who were responsible for the disease all along—that they were greedy fish who wanted the tank to themselves and so they killed off everyone else to make it so. But no, the rest of us said, you named that one fish Rimmer and suddenly he wanted to die, remember? yeah, that was definitely it. Scott scowled.

Not only were they healthy, they looked happy, Shrimp in particular. Shrimp would chase Curly around the tank, and then Curly would chase Shrimp for a little bit and then they would separate for a while until Shrimp was back on Curly’s tail They swam with vigor around their big empty tank. After a few weeks of being by themselves, us people declared them safe from disease and decided that they were in better shape than any of us.

--

I need some space to think. If I think, I can think something new, and then there won’t be all this

GET OUT. GET OUT OF HERE. LEAVE ME ALONE FOR JUST A FEW SECONDS, WILL YOU? DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I AM TIRED OF SEEING YOU? DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?

Is it fair that a superior creature has to spend all his time with something so stupid? Is this what was intended for us? Of course not. The unnatural constraints of civilization are seemingly inescapable. The question is, when does it become morally justifiable to

JESUS CHRIST, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? CAN YOU NOT SEE THAT I AM BUSY? ENTERTAIN YOURSELF FOR ONE GODDAMN MINUTE YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT. ENTERTAIN YOURSELF, CAN YOU NOT DO THAT? DO YOU KNOW HOW TO ENTERTAIN YOURSELF? BECAUSE IF YOU HAVE A BRAIN THEN YOU SHOULD KNOW HOW TO DO THAT, BUT IF YOU DON’T HAVE ONE THEN LET ME KNOW BECAUSE I HAVE ALWAYS SUSPECTED.

I need to meet someone new. I don’t need a lover and I don’t need a friend. I just need a new face, a new personality, a new anything, because the sameness of this place is oppressive. The filter pushes the water into the tank and the flakes fall from the sky and this idiot

YES I AM TALKING ABOUT YOU. GO AWAY. GO OVER THERE.

These flakes we are fed. These flakes; that is how they do it. They keep us passive by feeding us, the same bland, tasteless, insubstantial flakes every day. There is nothing to these papery flakes, nothing at all. They fill the belly and dull the instincts. We are hunters, we were born hunters, and these flakes have taken that away from us. It is not natural to live one’s life without the thrill of the hunt, without the taste of blood, without the power that

YEAH COME ON, SAY ONE MORE WORD. SAY ONE MORE FUCKING WORD. I MOTHERFUCKING DARE YOU. ALL RIGHT? ONE. GODDAMN. WORD.

It is decided. No more sameness.

--

One day, Curly was chasing Shrimp around the tank like he often would, but there was something different to it this time. It wasn’t fun. It was frenzied. Shrimp looked tired, and every once in a while Curly would slam into him and Shrimp would skip ahead and try to get away again, but he didn’t have Curly’s speed or stamina. All through homeroom it was like this. They didn’t stop.

What are they doing? we asked Ms. Szymanski.

She said that she didn’t know. Playing, probably. They had been doing it all morning.

That wasn’t right, we thought. Usually they rested, but not today. There was something more to it. It was obvious when we saw them forego their food, because Curly was too busy chasing and Shrimp was too busy trying to live.

--

I win.

Peace.

--

One day, Curly was the only one swimming around. He looked pretty pleased with himself.

We saw Shrimp, lying on the bottom of the tank. He was dead, and we didn’t know why he wasn’t floating. He must have been completely worn out, and emptied of air. In his back, there was unmistakably a tiny little bite mark.

We were all horrified. I wanted Curly killed immediately, of course, to make up for the murder of my little fish. But Ms. Szymanski wouldn’t be brought over to my side, and Curly swam around the whole tank. Proud and completely alone.

--



--

He didn’t live for long after that. It wasn’t the ick or anything. He was just a little fish, and little fish don’t live for very long. This was January or so. Ms. Szymanski fished his body and Shrimp’s little bones out of the tank. It sat empty for the rest of the year.