Sing Me a Fish

They said Tara’s voice could raise the dead, so why not resurrect her goldfish that her parents had sent down the commode?

Tara stares into the still water of the porcelain bowl, caught in the thought of her fish taking a final swim down there before batting its little fins like wings and going on to fish heaven. She doesn’t care what her friends said about losing a dog or cat taking more out of you than a fish going belly-up after a week, doesn’t care that none of them could keep interest in a pet you couldn’t touch for a good minute without it choking on air.

Tara’s fish mattered to her for all the hours it allowed her to invest in TV or books or video games without it begging her to be fed. It was special to her because it listened to what she had to say. When Tara’s parents took her to an animal shelter to pick a pet, the cats walked out on her words and the dogs craved her attention and affection as well as anyone and everyone else’s. Only her fish saw her as an individual, singular and vital. And that was how Tara saw her fish, beyond important, because it shared its time with her and no one else, and more so since it could talk back to her.

“How is the ocean?” she asked it one night, staring into one of its bubbly eyes.

The goldfish flipped and spun about, reflecting Tara’s nightlight with its scales, yellow hues morphing into liquid gold. Then its ‘O’ of a mouth worked, saying, “The ocean is but drops of water, little teardrops grown big. It is small. It is large. It is life.”

Tara couldn’t quite get her head around her fish’s monologue, but she stored it to memory as she would a teacher’s lecture because it sounded important.

“Are fish important in the ocean, where there are so many of you?”

“All is important,” Tara’s fish answered, “little or large, few or many.”

Tara understood this. Coach bashed this lesson into her head everyday during afterschool soccer practice. Kids are like ants – alone they appear feeble and lost; gathered together ants can get food from the picnic and kids can get goals on a field or sweets from unsuspecting parents’ cookie jars. Teamwork.

One night, Tara asked her fish one more question, just before it began swimming the wrong around, before its never-closing eyes closed out visions of the world. There was still one thing she couldn’t understand. “Am I important?” she asked. “Even if I’m not all pretty covered in bright-colored scales, or smart like you?” Anxiety was building up in Tara, though she didn’t quite have a name for it, anxiety over leaving elementary for middle school, childhood for almost-adulthood. Her fish couldn’t have left her at a worse time, but it did give her a few more words of wisdom prior to doing so.

“All are smart, in their own ways,” the fish spoke. “All are beautiful, to someone. Remember: All is important. Important is all.”

Tara swallowed her fish’s words, forced them down as she would cold medicine, so bitter. At the moment, they were hard for her to take because she couldn’t quite believe them. Tara couldn’t see the beauty in her dirty blonde hair and eyes colored swamp-mud brown; she couldn’t see her intelligence after having to repeat third grade for lack of computing multiplication and division. To her, she had no importance.

Tara stands alone now, her mother out with her baby sibling, her father in another world while his body lays a husk on the couch downstairs. She’s a squash-able little ant on her own, but perhaps she needn’t be. Perhaps she could be another sort of bug when not in a crowd: a bee that could sting and cause welts if harmed, or a butterfly, still squash-able, but only if caught mid-flutter and bottled up. Now was her chance to make herself important.

Water in commodes isn’t blue like the ocean and, momentarily, Tara wonders why. Unable to hold in hope or the air in her lungs any longer, Tara begins to sing or screech or caterwaul.

A miracle does occur immediately – her father starts to snore peacefully despite Tara’s disrespect for his rest. Eventually, when Tara has sung so hard and from so deep down that her toes are curling against the cold tile floor, she stops. Nothing seems different to her. She is still alone, no people, no fish, and the commode water remains static.

Tara growls as she clenches her fists and stomps her foot like her face is under it, she’s so mad at herself. That’s when the water decides to change. Bubbles pulse through the water like it’s about to boil, but rather than bursting on the surface, they collect and float in air, forming a sort of transparent honeycomb.

The honeycomb begins to play, like someone’s given it the command by remote control, and shows a video of the ocean, the ocean from deep, deep below. Anemone glow among seaweed and other sea grasses flitting back and forth like waving green and purple and bluish fingers. Fish cover every surface from the wide open blue to the sand floor where crustaceans occupy their fancy. Tara’s eyes tear up when one particular fish catches her eye, one that knew her contorted face and the tenor of her voice – her goldfish.

It looks at her, and she looks at it, though neither of them can truly see. One of them has misty vision and the other is but an illusion. Tara isn’t sure which she is, the girl dreaming of fish or a girl a fish dreamed.

The honeycomb shatters and the water droplets rain back into the bowl providing Tara with the short shush of an April shower. All is still again with the water replaced – the air, the bowl, Tara’s mind. She is satisfied. Her voice didn’t raise the dead. Her voice raised pleasant memory, regardless of its lack of tune.