Previously in Dead Pet Chronicles: Aristotle the Turtle.
“Are fish supposed to look like this?”
My two roommates appeared by my side, our faces almost touching as we peered into the tank, so close our breath fogged the plastic. The three of us peered into the one-gallon tank on my dresser, full of neon pink rocks, a fake plant, a gray plastic castle, and a purple-maroon Betta, our beloved Wanda, the mascot of Claflin Hall, room 107, who was not doing well.
“She looks… swollen,” Anna said.
“Kind of puffy,” said Leigh.
“Why are her scales sticking out like that?”
Wanda floated in her tank, barely bothering to swish her fins, ignoring the flakes of food I sprinkled on the surface above her enlarged head. Her scales – normally a bright, shiny metallic purple – were muted and protruding, no longer lying flat against her skin.
Leigh, on the premed track, turned to her computer. After a few minutes of research, she had the diagnosis:
“Dropsy. It’s definitely dropsy.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s when the fish can’t expel water any more and keeps absorbing it. That’s why she looks bloated: she’s full of water – even her organs. Listen: ‘When your fish resembles a pine cone, it’s too late for anything to be done.’”
We glanced back at my dresser. Wanda looked like a spikey, purple pinecone.
“Umm,” I said, a sick feeling swelling inside of me. “How does a fish get dropsy?” While all three of us treated Wanda as our communal pet, she was technically my fish and my responsibility. If Wanda was sick, I knew I had screwed up somehow.
“It’s when some sort of virus or infection gets under their scales and into their system. The website says it usually happens from using tap water instead of treated or bottled water.”
“Oh.”
Everyone went quiet. Leigh looked at me, narrowing her eyes.
“Did you use tap water, E.B.?”
I thought of the night a week ago, feeling cheap and lazy, too tired to go down to the basement to grab some Poland Springs from the vending machine, sleepy from a couple beers with classmates, deciding that the town of Wellesley’s tap water must be good enough for a fish.
No one said anything. Leigh shook her head.
“So, what do we do now? Do we just wait for her to die?”
Leigh sighed. “I guess.”
***
A long week passed. There had been tension in our freshman triple from the beginning: three extreme personalities, with wildly different interests and living habits. Anna was a former ballerina who had been home-schooled until she arrived on campus, new to sharing her space. Leigh was goofy, high-energy Los Angeles native who enjoyed hip-hop, John Lennon, Korean pop, and biology. I spent most of my first year out of the room drinking with friends from Russian class or reading Tolstoy novels on my bed, listening to David Bowie through headphones. Things became uncomfortable as Leigh and I became close, bonding over the fact that we liked to stay up late, and Anna, who preferred to go to sleep early, became the odd one out. But we had Wanda in common. When an uneasy silence enveloped Claflin 107, one could always make a pleasant comment about the fish. Despite our differences, it was a droopy, boring Betta that brought us together. Even the regular visitors to our room – my best friend from home, Leigh’s boyfriend, Anna’s mother – enjoyed checking on the fish. But with Wanda slowly, desperately trying to die, the tension escalated.
***
After seven days, I said: “Guys, I can’t take it anymore.”
I woke up every morning, hoping to find the fish floating on the surface, but every time Wanda persisted in living, bobbing in the water, even more swollen and globular than the night before.
“Every minute we wait is cruel, and a week is already too much.”
Leigh and Anna grimly agreed, though what was really swelling in my own insides was guilt. Every time I saw that fish – still alive, somehow – I thought of my own laziness, lack of responsibility, and the fact that I probably shouldn’t have children. I needed Wanda gone.
So, Leigh began her next phase of research: the most humane methods of fish euthanasia. We ruled out beheading with a sharp knife or stomping with a shoe, along with flushing, which was described as “the coward’s method” of killing a fish – waiting for water treatment plants to finish it off after many hours in plumbing, still alive and desperate.
“How about this?” Leigh said. “You put a couple drops of clove oil in the water to sedate the fish. Then, you put it in some kind of grain alcohol, because there is no oxygen. The fish immediately suffocates but doesn’t feel anything because it’s knocked out from the clove oil.”
“Ok, great,” I said. “Does anyone have any clove oil?”
“I could get some tomorrow…” Leigh offered.
“No, this has to happen tonight.”
The guilt would kill me if we waited another day.
“I’ll send out a dorm-wide email.”
We gave it an hour. I received many sympathetic messages in response to our plight, some suggesting alternative types of murder. Each ping of a new email broke the thick silence in our room with a glimmer of hope, but no one had any clove oil. It was time to proceed, but we would have to skip step one. Wanda would not be getting the easy way out.
I trudged up to the fourth floor, to the miniature double where two sophomore friends lived.
“Do you guys still have that giant jug of Poland Springs vodka?”
“Oh, god yes, gross. It’s under my bed. No way I am drinking that stuff. What the hell do you want it for?”
***
Leigh, Anna, the two sophomores, and I crowded into the dorm kitchen, joined by another friend who had walked from her dorm across campus for moral support. The six of us pushed into the tight room that reeked of molding microwavable mac and cheese and stale beer.
“Let’s get this over with,” someone said.
We stared at the two cups on the sticky counter by the sink: one full of water and a sickly Betta, one full of the most foul, gasoline-tasting liquid in the history of liquor.
“Ok,” I said. “I guess I have to do it, don’t I?”
Everyone else was quiet. I threw back a shot of the Poland Springs in solidarity – gagging as I picked up the Betta-filled cup, slipping her into the burning, clear alcohol. Suddenly all lethargy gone, Wanda flipped, frantically fighting; her will to live was back with violence. The small body spun with ferocious strength, breaking the surface of the vodka with sharp splashes.
“Oh!” cried Anna. “Oh, this is why we needed the clove oil!”
The fish snapped like a flag in a hurricane. She twisted from side to side, sometimes on her back, her gills cutting the surface and miniature mouth opening and closing in a perfect circle. One final shiver, and finally, Wanda was still.
The six of us went out into the dorm courtyard, a mild October night, and buried the limp, bloated Betta in a hole dug in the mulch with a spoon pilfered from the dining hall. We chose a spot under a tree that we could see from our first-floor room. We buried Wanda with the contents of her tank: the fake plant, some pink stones, and the plastic castle. Leigh told Wanda how much we would miss her. We had a moment of silence. I poured out some vodka on the ground.
“Well, that’s that,” I said.
I brushed the mulch off my hands, and we went inside.
***
The next morning, I woke up to see my roommates staring out the window in horror.
A family of squirrels was digging in the soil under the tree. Unnatural pink rocks were scattered in the dirt, the gray castle was off to the side, and one of the squirrels was chewing on an inedible plant. The small grave we had carefully created the night before had been excavated and emptied. The three of us stared. No one spoke.
“Well,” I said, breaking the somber silence. “There’s a squirrel out there now that’s either very sick or very drunk.”
Leigh and Anna sighed, and I shrugged and turned away from the window to check my email. There was one new message from the third-floor RA.
“Hey, E.B.! My grandmother is super into Chinese medicine so I actually have a ton of clove oil. Come on upstairs if you still need it! I hope I’m not too late!”
Tags: animals, childhood, dead pet chronicles, e.b. bartels, fish, loss, the finality of death
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My favorite betta – Brydon, after Rob Brydon – suffered from some kind of horrible fish disease that no matter how we tried to treat it (between betta fix and antibiotics) nothing would help. My sister was the one to google “fish euthanasia” and our first hit was apparently to put him in the freezer. I couldn’t do it. I could not bring myself to euthanize my beloved fish and let him try to swim out his final days in as much comfort as I could provide.
This is probably the biggest moral dilemma I have ever faced. I’m sorry, Brydon. I hope you weren’t in too much pain.
When I was a small child, living in Texas after my parents got divorced and my mom moved us back in with her folks, I desperately wanted a dog. Mom vetoed this, and got us a small red Betta instead. We called him “Two Dollar Fish” because she’d bought him at Walmart for two dollars. He lived on our kitchen table, serving as a weirdo living centerpiece at dinner.
After a couple months, my brother and I went to our dad’s for New Year’s Eve, while my mom and grandparents went to Dallas….totally forgetting about Two Dollar Fish. She beat us home and realized her mistake, immediately replacing Two Dollar Fish with Two Dollar Fish: Beta Version (heh).
My brother and I came home and failed to realize that anything had gone awry with Two Dollar Fish in our absence. Then we went out of town again. Our house,100 years old and lacking central heat, had its temperature dropped down to below freezing. We returned to find Two Dollar Fish: Beta a frozen fish-cicle on the table. My brother cried. We allowed him to thaw, thinking that he might come back to life like those frogs. We were wrong. We flushed him.
My mom didn’t tell us that we’d actually had two fishes until shortly before I graduated high school.
Ohhhhh, the Fishstick.
This also happened to me, and my first betta, named Xi for the aggressively smallest word in Scrabble.
Not the secret replacement fish, though, that’s spectacular.
As children, my brother and I killed numerous fish after we enthusiastically washed the tank and all the stones and plastic plants in detergent. The fish tank was then followed by a series of budgerigars we proceeded to choke to death by feeding them white bread instead of their designated grain. Our parents then realized they were nurturing little psychopaths and kept us away from all live animals thereafter. We turned to enthusiastically looking after a friends new puppy who luckily managed to outlive our attentions.
At least you have ignorance to cushion your psychopathic tendencies. My ex’s mother had a decent sized fish tank filled with fish that solely existed for the cats’ amusements. A couple times, when Mother got bored of having fish, she purposely put Clorox in the tank to quicken their demise. Surprisingly, there were always a few that still survived…until she eventually just flushed them.
When I was small, I had a series of fish that came from a kiosk in the mall. When Fish #1 began to look lethargic and ill, I tok to tapping desperately and repeatedly on the glass, thinking that if I could get the fish to keep moving, it wouldn’t stay still long enough to die. My concept of mortality was somewhat flawed.
Our dorm goldfish (one was given to each suite in our dorm and ours was the only one to survive more than a year) made it for almost three years, survived a couple beers to the tank over a summer vacation, and lived through black spots after we cleaned the tank with something we shouldn’t. He finally died on a 95 degree day when the power shorted out and his oxygen bubbler stopped working.
Maybe the number of times I had to carry a sloshing tank up and down stairs brainwashed me a little, but I… kind of still miss the fish, five years later.
My brothers and I won fish from a church fair once. A small fish tank was somehow acquired, and there began a series of unfortunate aquatic pets. After the carny fish succumbed to fate, we went to a pet store for three guppies…two of which adjusted fine and were happy. The series of “third fish” finally ended when one managed to outlive the 36 hour free-replacement period by about a day, and Mom decided two fish were enough. To my embarrassment, I don’t actually remember how much longer the other two lasted…
OH GOD. I have this intense moral dilemma around pet-having (despite having pets) and this is partly why. You don’t just have an animal in life (problematic enough) – you become responsible for its death too! ARGH.
What is it about bettas?
Malachi I lived about a year, and was killed (and replaced) by a roommate while I was out of town. Malachi II lived for over two years, and finally succumbed to some sort of fungus that started eating away at a fin and causing him to swim wobbily, and finally to swim no longer. The dynasty ended with him.
I had no idea about the treated water thing! Our tap must have been just fine. I started out with four feeder fish, whom I named after my immediate family. I was a horribly abusive fish owner, and so it will forever be on my conscience that I drove at least one of them to cannibalism in relatively short order. (No…debris, either. I’d wake up and another fish would have vanished.) Mommy-fish (not her real name), the last one swimming, lived for ten years. My mom had a good sense of humor about her namesake’s bloodthirsty survival tactics.
D:!!!!!!!!!
D:!!!!!!!!!
In college, I was in this program where a group of students got together and designed their own research. (A terrible idea, really, to let a bunch of dumb over-confident sophomore nerds design a research study with minimal faculty supervision.) We wanted to study endocrine disruptors on fish reproductivity (specifically, how the hormone in birth control pills affected fish sperm motility, cell death, and DNA damage). I won’t get into our terribly flawed methodology, but our first attempt resulted in a bunch of fathead minnows with exploding eyeballs. We triple checked our water quality, made sure the food was okay, and stopped exposure to the hormone, but each day, floating in the expensive rack system a research org donated to us, there’d be a handful of dead fish with bloody, empty eyes. It was awful. Turns out, they had a blood fluke infection when we got them from the vendor, so it wasn’t quite our fault, but I still feel absolutely terrible about it.
(For the record, we went through all proper animal testing training and got the animal equivalent of IRB approval.)
This is a great and well-written story, which was my initial intent on commenting here. Once I saw it was share-dead-fish-stories time, I couldn’t help myself.
Umm… I was in a similar program in college… did yours have a sort of stupid name related to jewelry? Slash everyone was really obsessed with giving their team names acronyms? (I’m about to be REALLY excited if it turns out we went through the same program!)
YES! Trying to figure out a way to confirm we went to the same school without revealing too much on the internet (not sure if that’s a thing to be wary of anymore or not?). But if you ever had drinks at C-Stone or studied at Stamp, then yes, we definitely went through the same program!
Our team name was spelled like an acronym (all caps, periods in between the letters), but it didn’t stand for anything because we thought it was funnier that way.
What was your research on? What year were you? (I was 2010.)
AH, yes!! So exciting! I literally just cackled for ten straight seconds at your acronym defiance. We didn’t have an acronym name either. I was 2013 and our research was about food access in low income populations. A (gasp) social science team. No acronym, no labs… we were the outlier (ha ha research joke). Our project also predictably fell apart in a few ways, because we somehow expected to magically retain all of our survey participants through a summer and then a post-intervention survey. Alas, it was not to be.
Oh man, what a funny coincidence!
In college, I was in this program where a group of students got together and designed their own research. (A terrible idea, really, to let a bunch of dumb over-confident sophomore nerds design a research study with minimal faculty supervision.) We wanted to study endocrine disruptors on fish reproductivity (specifically, how the hormone in birth control pills affected fish sperm motility, cell death, and DNA damage). I won't get into our terribly flawed methodology, but our first attempt resulted in a bunch of fathead minnows with exploding eyeballs. We triple checked our water quality, made sure the food was okay, and stopped exposure to the hormone, but each day, floating in the expensive rack system a research org donated to us, there'd be a handful of dead fish with bloody, empty eyes. It was awful. Turns out, they had a blood fluke infection when we got them from the vendor, so it wasn't quite our fault, but I still feel absolutely terrible about it.
(For the record, we went through all proper animal testing training and got the animal equivalent of IRB approval.)
This is a great and well-written story, which was my initial intent on commenting here. Once I saw it was share-dead-fish-stories time, I couldn't help myself.
One of my fish ate all the others and then died.
I still have the tank. I’m thinking of turning it into a terrarium.
One of my fish ate all the others and then died.
I still have the tank. I'm thinking of turning it into a terrarium.
Umm… I was in a similar program in college… did yours have a sort of stupid name related to jewelry? Slash everyone was really obsessed with giving their team names acronyms? (I'm about to be REALLY excited if it turns out we went through the same program!)
I'm pretty sure this is what happened in my childhood fish tank. Every other morning we'd come downstairs and find another fish gone, until eventually there was only the smallest one left. How did Dizzy do that??
YES! Trying to figure out a way to confirm we went to the same school without revealing too much on the internet (not sure if that's a thing to be wary of anymore or not?). But if you ever had drinks at C-Stone or studied at Stamp, then yes, we definitely went through the same program!
Our team name was spelled like an acronym (all caps, periods in between the letters), but it didn't stand for anything because we thought it was funnier that way.
What was your research on? What year were you? (I was 2010.)
At least you have ignorance to cushion your psychopathic tendencies. My ex's mother had a decent sized fish tank filled with fish that solely existed for the cats' amusements. A couple times, when Mother got bored of having fish, she purposely put Clorox in the tank to quicken their demise. Surprisingly, there were always a few that still survived…until she eventually just flushed them.
AH, yes!! So exciting! I literally just cackled for ten straight seconds at your acronym defiance. We didn't have an acronym name either. I was 2013 and our research was about food access in low income populations. A (gasp) social science team. No acronym, no labs… we were the outlier (ha ha research joke). Our project also predictably fell apart in a few ways, because we somehow expected to magically retain all of our survey participants through a summer and then a post-intervention survey. Alas, it was not to be.
Oh man, what a funny coincidence!