Chance the Goldfish

- Poetry - 
(Based on a true story...I mean...almost all my poems are,
I just felt the need to clarify that with this one.)

​My sister once
(when she was a kid)
took my pet goldfish
        and hid
        it in the bathroom drawer.
 
After dinner I wandered to my room,
   and peered in the fish bowl:
         Rainbow rocks? Check.
         Turquoise arch? Check.
         Fish food? Check.
         Fish? Uhhh…
            Fish. Huh.
 
I’d only had the fish
   for three days.
   It lived in a small
      globe bowl,
      and to have misplaced a fish
         made me feel,
            well,
               crazed.
 
I moseyed downstairs,
   red-faced,
“Hey, mom. Have you seen my fish?”
 
But no one had seen it.
There are only so many places
   a fish should be.
 
My sister
(at the time 3 or 4)
grinned from ear to ear
sitting on the kitchen floor.
 
We couldn’t get it out of her.
We tried:
      -good cop
      -bad cop
      -desperate parent
      -hostage negotiator.
                Nothing.
 
“The fish is probably dead,”
      my mother said.
By our estimations
   (namely that my sister
      had been with my parents
      since well before dinner)
that poor fish died hours ago
at the hands of toddler ego.
 
I cried.
I wept at the death
   of my dollar, Wal-Mart goldfish.
 
About an hour after dinner
   I went to the bathroom.
   I opened a drawer just to look through,
   and wouldn’t you know it?
      There was my fish:
         scales starting to dull,
         eyes bulged and thick,
         and…
               its little mouth
               slowly extending, opening;
               its gills flashing
               – like window blinds –
               spelling out an SOS.
 
That bastard survived at least two more years,
   before calling it quits.
 
20-some-odd years later,
   and the memory of that little fish
   does his little bit
   to help make the world
   make a little more sense.
 
Because when I find myself
   silently screaming
   into a darkness
   – dry and alien –
   that strips me of feeling,
   slathering on the misery,
   and I wait for hours
      that feel increasingly like years,
   I derive the minutest bit of hope
   knowing that fucking lucky fish
      got back in the water
      and got back home.