Fish
Our dad’s last Father’s Day wasn’t about him. It was about a fish. Goldie—who wasn’t the goldfish he was supposed to be—decided he’d spent enough time trying to live up to his wrong-colour name and went from dark blue to white to dead.
We buried him by the side of the house in a construction-paper coffin and put a rock on top to make sure we wouldn’t step on his grave. He was the first to be interred in our backyard cemetery, eventually to be followed by two other fish and a bird that dropped dead in the grass a few summers later. I think it was a robin.
Because it was the fish’s day, our dad took us to the fish store. I liked that it was a fish store, and not a pet store. The back room was my favourite part. It was dimly lit, with a faint blue light coming from the columns and columns of tanks. They even had a nurse shark, which let me tell my little brother about how they’re one of the only species of shark that can stop swimming. Now that I’m older, I wonder about the ethics of the store, but to a seven-year-old, it was magical.
We looked at more types of betta fish than I can remember. I fell in love with a half-moon betta with a shimmering tail that rippled in the aquarium-blue light, who followed my finger as I traced it along the glass. My brother picked out a red one and named him Cory (Cory as in the dinosaur from the googly-eyed pop-up book he loved; Cory as in it sort of sounds like coral, and fish swim in coral; Cory as in almost my eventual name, which I didn’t realize when I chose it, since the fish had been dead for years; Cory as in I swear I didn’t name myself after a fish).
Cory was the more energetic fish. When he was young, he would jump partway out of the water when we came to feed him. As he got older, this turned into him jumping all the way out of his tank. The first time it happened, I screamed and started to cry while my dad scooped him up and put him back into the tank. He was fine. The last time it happened, my dad wasn’t alive anymore to save him. He ran out of air while everyone else was asleep.
originally published in Volume 35 of The Undergraduate Review.