something fishy

With a pet-load of 4 cats and a dog, and a houseful of bipeds who haven’t evolved too far from our Cro-Magnon days, I’ve seriously resisted all new pet entreaties.
But there wasn’t much I could do when the college freshman came home for the summer with two goldfish in a tupperware tank...refugees from the St. Mary’s bio lab where their alternate destiny was to serve as hors d’oeuvres for the big fish.

Rachel calls them Barbie and Tip. I prefer to think of them as Audrey and Audrey II. It’s not that they actually have audible voices, but their attitude, every time I walk into the room screams “FEED ME!” (This is not supposed to be my problem, but Rachel has approximately 3012 friends, all of whom must be visited during the next 2 months, so I’ve inherited fish feeding detail as often as I might have guessed it would happen.)

Barbie, (or Audrey,) is actually fortunate to be around to scarf the yummy goldfish flakes at all, seeing as how she decided, on day two of her residency here, to take a swan dive out of the tupperware. She owes her life to Freddi the dog, whose barking and sniffing alerted Olivia to the orange and seemingly lifeless body on the floor. I picked her up in tissue, in a quandary as to what to do next with Rachel still asleep, when the fish wiggled and I hastily redeposited her in the water.

Since then we’ve acquired a small tank with a safety lid, and a couple types of fish antibiotics to treat the black splotch disease which indubitably the little piscean’s near death experience made her more susceptible too.
But all’s cool now, if only I can resist those little sucky mouths making o’s at me through the tank walls every time I go in the room.