Seymour the Fighter Fish

The betta fish has been flotsam for about a week now, maybe longer.

I don't know why I keep putting fish food in the goldfish bowl, but I do. It sinks to the bottom in rainbow colors till like all promises of nurture, disappears into the tiny rocks, pebbles, stepping stones of our aquarium filled lives.

I rationalize that my fish was just another small import from Asia to fascinate the cubicle dwellers in envious color, a fad, a pet rock like fad. Just another way for us to house cockfights at our desk and think of it as humane, not a big deal, after all they're just Siamese fighting fish. If I'd had two pit bulls I'm pretty sure I would've gotten fired sooner. Maybe I should have had two pit bulls, they're expected to fight, kill kill kill. What's the difference?  I shouldn't have exposed my gambling problem.

I have an urge to dramatically pick up the goldfish bowl that houses the dead bloated body of Seymour the Siamese Fight Fish Champion and smash it in all his glory against the kitchen wallpaper.

This will not affect anyone but me. First, it will alleviate my need for drama.

Second, it will give me something to clean up.

This is how I lead my life.

I don't pick up the fishbowl and smash it.   I decide that's too destructive, even for me. A strange sensitivity washes over me and I can't bear the thought of flushing Seymour down the drain into the toilet water of life. Not to mention, my plumbing is awful and I might have to plunge poor Seymour out and if that happened, well, I'm not sure I could stomach it. Like I said, I'm feeling a little sensitive now.

The phone rings. I hate the sound of the phone. The phone interrupts my thoughts. The phone is a device that transmits banter from senseless lobes of the brain, usually classified as gossip, this gossip has played a game strictly through the telephone and by the time it gets to my ear drums, pounds its way through the canals and enters my nervous system, I feel contaminated.

My frontal lobe is listening to the idiot on the other line. My parietal lobe is forcing my finger in the fishbowl, poking at Seymour's slimy body. His lovely fins, sway in the water like wings, I start to pull at them like loose threads, the water keeps me from destroying him, it's more of a surreal image.

The voice is the same voice I always hear, my temporal lobe cannot decipher the importance of the conversation by the tone, I've become indifferent.

I want to leave the kitchen but I am forced to sit here staring at the mustard side lawn through my occipital lobe and the wired fence because I don't believe in cordless phones. After all, the chain of conversation already has me tied to the phone, therefore, why carry it around like deadweight, might as well just stay put and listen for the ride.

That's when my limbic lobe forgets the logic in the fishbowl. I don't want another fish. I loved Seymour the Siamese Fighting Fish.

I'm no longer listening to the drone on the other end. My forefinger strokes Seymour one last time.

I pick up the bowl, it's in the palm of my hand. The phone is cradled on my shoulder PRESSING into my ear. I walk back a few paces as far as the phone chord will let me and hurl the fishbowl.

It smashes, water splashes, and Seymour slides down the teapot papered wall.

"Excuse me, I have to hang up now." I say.

My first failure in caring for Seymour the Champion Siamese Fighter Fish was the fact that he required calm water.

The second was my obvious negligence.

Before I was fired, before my life as I knew it fell a part, before he died, he got sick. Before that, he was a champion of all betta fishes. He was the King of cubicle battles. He fought himself in more reflections than most men do in lifetime.

Seymour contracted a disease called Louse. I laughed when I first noticed the parasites eating away at him. Two doses of medication would have saved him. I had no problem with that, not even the price I'd pay to get him well. I just did not have the time.

With Richard Cory awareness of my life, I let Seymour become the feeding device for small inferior parasites.

I'd bring the mirror out of the desk drawer. The same one that I'd used months earlier to snort meth from in the bathroom down the hall. I got sick of staring at my reflection with a McDonald's yellow striped straw encased in my left nostril streaming by till the burn shifted and I clutched both the straw and mirror in hand not wanting to look at either. Now the mirror was Seymour's problem. He fought his own image, just like I had, he was winning, even with parasites leeching off his beautiful scales, he was winning.

I scooped up the wet broken glass from the floor with less than Bounty quicker picker upper and tossed the glass into my olive trash can. Seymour was not quite on the floor, as if he knew once hitting the ground in a dream, he would never wake. He was stuck to the lower wall molding, like a last tree branch.

Seymour died when I went on vacation a bit ago.

I left him in my cubicle and forgot to ask someone to look after him. After my third day out of the office I'd realized I might want to call in and see if someone could feed him, but figured that he'd be okay, if he wasn't, I'd have heard by then, right? Ashamed that I'd neglected him and afraid of finding out the sordid truth, that he might be dead and I hadn't cured him of his louse disease, I continued my vacation in a drunken haze.

The glass was in the trash, the water had been sponged up. The floor was dry and I picked my champion betta fish fighter off the wall between my fingers. Burial, I must give him a proper burial. Considering, I was Seymour's only friend and survivor, I would be the pallbearer. I put his drying body into my pocket.

I walked over to the CD player and picked out a Roger Miller CD for the occasion. I put the CD in and selected the track and went back to the kitchen with Seymour in my pocket and took two shots of tequila and sang along.

"Well I think I finely found me a sure fire way to forget,
It's so simple, I'm surprised I haven't done thought of it before yet
Its fool proof, well it's fool hatred maybe, but who knows,
Anyway, here I am walking toward where the cold out water flows
Is all it takes is,
"One dying and a burying, one dying and a burying
Some crying, six caring me, I want to be free.
Oh, I want to be free,
Free from all this heart aching regret,
And free from pining for the love I can't forget,
The love that once was warm and then some how turned to hate
Made my life a prison from which there is only one escape
And that's one dying and a burying, One dying and a burying
Some crying, six caring me, I want to be free.
One dying and a burying, one dying and a burying
Some crying, six caring me, I want to be free."

After the song ended, on repeat a few times and after a few more shots of tequila, I decided Seymour was no more gross than a worm in a bottle and I swallowed him whole.