Betta Off Dead
As a kid, I had a Betta. Well, that’s what I thought. As it turns out, I had lots of Bettas. I had never heard that word, though. Back then, I only knew them as Siamese Fighting Fish. We kept him in a tiny bowl with no filter and no heater, as the pet store had instructed. This is the most effective way to passively kill Bettas, and therefore is the best way to sell lots of them.
Every so often, I would notice that he looked a bit different. My mother told me that was common. 40 years later, she still didn’t understand why I didn’t trust her, but she’s dead now, and I didn’t pop out to the mom store for a new one.
One day, I found a fish floating before she could, and I was unceremoniously introduced to death. That had to be hard for her.
All I knew about what came next I had learned from TV. When someone you love dies, you have a funeral. I instructed the family to dress up. We had a few conch shells in the basement, and I appropriated one as a gravestone. It was a sea creature, and at that age, water was water. I wrote the first fish’s name on it; I had not been formally introduced to this imposter. Sadly, that monument quickly blew away.
We gathered in the yard in a persistent drizzle to bury my mother’s latest victim. I delivered a eulogy of some fashion and asked if anyone else wanted to say a few words. My mother was sobbing, and I…
