fish food

In my bedroom I keep six fish, brazenly extracted from a creek 100 miles or so away -- more guppies than fish, really -- swimming in a squalid five gallon tank, encrusted with hard-water build-up that I have neglected to clean for at least 18 months now; and there you will find my soul.

I think they may grow up to be trout, but one never knows, and I don't want to keep them because, even though I have never once cleaned the tank or similarly put any effort into fishkeeping, six full-size trout seems to be a bit too much of a hassle, but, then again, I don't want to release them into the "wild" because if they die it will have been my fault -- not to mention the possibility of ecosystem contamination. Is this what responsibility feels like?

Mind you, there used to be more --exactly how many I am unsure, at least 11 I think -- but they may have eaten each other, for fish do not presume to be polite when they are hungry.

I keep them fed though, when I'm around, look into the tank pensively from time to time -- I put in one stick and one rock from their old creek, I like to think that they like them, or at least think that they like them, but maybe they just get homesick -- one fish is bigger than all the others, but that sort of thing is a statistical certainty with a set "F" of fish where the number of fish "f" is > 1. The fish don't do much. Are they happy?

In my soul/fishtank there is a filter that is so overworked that it can't possibly be of any use anymore; it sets on all night gurgling like a very small creek running over exactly one rock and one stick that remind me of homesick; in my soul/fishtank there are a number of little swimmy bits -- a number that seems to be shrinking -- a small bit of life, raw, living with questionable comfort in a small box that never changes and has a waxing shell of hard salts and minerals deposited on the walls; they swim and sometimes get fed and sometimes eat eachother for no reason and I don't know what to do with them.

The fish follow my fingers on the other side of their glass enclosure, and will nibble at them if I press them against the water's surface.

If I let my fish go they may die and I don't think I could handle that, but I'm not sure I can handle them growing large anyway.

This, I think, is the least-interesting, most-pedestrian catch-22 that has ever arisen. My soul doesn't do much besides keeping a smattering of small vertebrates alive, but I'm attached to it with this bland sentimentality -- nostalgia for an off-white and lightly chipped dinner plate off the 4.99$ rack at Ross.

The seventh fish was found shriveled and dead, mouth agape in bug-eyed and leering surprise, on the carpet, a full 4 inches -- a heroic leap for a small fish of questionable trout-hood -- from the safety of my soul/fishtank. Did he(?) understand the consequences of his actions? Do any of us?

I, of course, picked him(?) up and performed the generations-old ritual of toilet-bowl burial. If I continue to do nothing, or rather feed them and maybe clean the tank for once in my goddamned life, will all the inhabitants of my fishtank/soul kill themselves or die of natural causes or eat eachother? Can I solve this conundrum, this question of what to do with my occupied soul of questionable trout-hood, this question of scraping off mineral deposits from the walls of my eyes to see the world clearly, this question of giving or not giving a damn again, by doing nothing?

The filter stays on all night, thoughtlessly aerating the water, quietly gurgling, but the fish remain ungrateful as always.