Selena Wisnom

It never seemed to matter when the black ones died. As it stopped breathing bubbles it bloated to the surface like a globule in a lava lamp, and bulged there as its scales already began to peel, a single wet dark eye tadpole-like reflecting the ceiling of its tank, black plastic grating, and the other staring down, staring right down at her as it floated on the membrane between the world’s one eye fixed on each. She wondered what it had been thinking as it died and whether it knew Mummy only wanted it to absorb their bad luck, and if it did know, whether it minded. It didn’t have a name – the black ones died so often she got bored of thinking up new names for them all the time. Sometimes she didn’t even notice when they died – it looked a bit poorly in the morning, but by the time she had come home from school it would be happy again, kicking its tail happily like a fish in water.

The other fish, the orange ones, seemed to live for ever, she couldn’t remember any of them dying. She wondered whether they made friends with the black fish of the family and whether they missed them when they were gone, but they never looked sad. They were always playing in Disneyland with plastic statues of the little mermaid and multi-coloured neon gravel and glow-in-the dark plants that look like candy floss and coral that was cave-sized for the little bodies playing hide and seek. Besides, Mummy said they only had a memory of six seconds, so they probably wouldn’t remember that there had been any other black fish but the one there was, and when it died, while Mummy was at the shop buying a new one they probably just thought it was asleep in the cave. So they wouldn’t remember the sea either, and even if they did they wouldn’t miss it because now they lived in Disneyland and who would rather live in the sea when you could live in Disneyland for ever? Mummy said they didn’t come from the sea, they came from the pet shop and the pet shop got them from a pet shop pet shop, but this made them seem even more immortal and even more confusing when they died, though it made the orange fish living so long more understandable. Poor black fish, there must be a lot of bad luck aimed at us all the time for them to keep dying.

She gave the other five orange fish names, and would introduce them to her friends, pretending to point them out confidently, although actually they all looked the same. Mummy had chosen them specially to all be the same size and have the same eyes and colour, because they were part of a set and had to match, although she sometimes felt sorry for the black fish because maybe this made it feel even more left out.

They ate a lot of black fish too, it was always black, or pink, or sometimes white covered in orange breadcrumbs, but never orange orange fish. She never liked eating black fish because it felt like they were eating other people’s bad luck. The good luck fish never died. These fish were much bigger than the ones in their home tank, it must have taken a lot of bad luck to kill them. She asked Mummy where they came from and she said the supermarket and that the supermarket got them from fish farms where fish all live together like sheep do, but the pet shop was next door to the supermarket and fish all live together there. She didn’t mind eating white fish and chips because she knew that the crunchy golden skin wasn’t part of the fish, but black fish always tasted bitter and she couldn’t understand why it was all right to eat them. She only saw big fish like that in zoos and zoos belonged to everyone, so she was scared these big black fish were dead because they had absorbed the bad luck of everyone in the zoo that day, and that’s a lot of people.

She didn’t know what happened to the black fish when they died, they just disappeared. Her mother thought them unworthy of any special treatment, just rotting pieces of flesh and threw them over the garden fence, over the boundaries of their home rather than spreading their energy by flushing it down the toilet and dispersing it through the whole house via the waterworks. That would never do. The memory of the water would take up the bad luck, the particles it dyed them with as it passed through and this would spread through the whole house, it would flow into the radiators and warm into the metal, rise with the heat into the air and be breathed in again and absorbed by us as we absorb the heat and bad luck would creep into the tissues of our pink bodies and it would be as if the black fish had never died at all.

And although six months seems forever to a six year old, goldfish are not immortal, except for not being human. One day an orange fish did die, it sailed to the top of the tank like a balloon and stayed there, because both her parents were away, gone to visit Nana in hospital, and the baby sitter wasn’t paid enough to administer last rites for pets, so she watched it inflating and hovering like a hot air balloon shining orange sun up at her out of the sky of the tank as she peered down and felt dizzy like she was lying in the garden staring up at the sky or watching the shadows over the ground. And the black fish looked just as happy as it always had swimming among the other four as if they were old friends, and the other orange fish didn’t look sad at all and never once looked up at the second sun. But she was sad, and watched it for what felt like all day until the lightbulb was the same colour as the fish and Father came home and did not say how Nana was or where Mummy was only that it was for the best. She told him that the fish was floating and without thinking he took the lid off the tank and scooped it up in a tea cup and poured it into the toilet bowl, pressing the handle as automatically as if switching on the kettle. No one had fed the fish that day because Mummy hadn’t been home and they were Mummy’s pets not hers and Daddy threw a handful of confetti into the tank instead of food so they didn’t touch it.

Fish cannot smile for they have gashes in their faces not mouths, where the pouches of their bodies have been slit open like slots for coins. They cannot blink but always hold the same expression, as black and orange kiss and devour their new-laid eggs.