Goldfish are fickle beasts.
At the slightest upset they leave this world for
wherever the souls of little carnival prizes go.
My water is too warm?
Good day to you sir,
I have better places to be.
One would think that they fake their deaths
just to go on an adventure through the sewage system.
But not a silverfish. Oh no.
When I was eight, I won three of them,
and two promptly died on the car ride home.
And so I made a wish, on this little fish,
that he would outlive them all,
live to see me grow old
and go belly up before he.
I gave him some name lost to injuries of time,
but I’m fairly certain
that it was some variation of Goldy.
And in a lapse of judgment,
we put his little bowl next to the microwave,
and there he lived.
For six years.
We were astounded when he made it to six weeks old,
and even more so when he slowly lost his gold,
and became a silver fish.
Microwave radiation works small miracles.
It was poor Goldy’s misfortune that he outlived the microwave,
and two weeks after, he couldn’t be saved.