I wasn’t too sure about adding a very large, fresh water shrimp to our aquarium, but the pet shop was going out of business and Javier can’t refuse a bargain. “Look how cool,” he said, pointing excitedly to one of the half-empty tanks, “AND HE’S HALF OFF! We’ve got to get him!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s big. He might eat the fish.”
“No, no. Shrimp are scavengers.” Javier said in his teacher voice. I hate the teacher voice; it makes me want to act out, throw a spitball like I’m back in 7th grade.
“We’ll call him Jumbo, okay, honey?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Whatever.”
Several days after, all eight of the beautiful, flashing neon Tetras went missing. We looked for the little bodies in the filter (perhaps it sucked them in?) and on the floor (perhaps they suicided jointly in protest of flake food?) and found nothing. Jumbo had stopped nervously feeling every surface with his antennae like a compulsive. He’d lodged himself inside the cave, enjoying the darkness. Could he have murdered all those fish? It was probably some freak, fast-acting disease that had killed the tetras. They are notorious for dying off in groups. But the lack of remains was alarming.
The next day the male killifish was gone. Were our fish being raptured up to some deluxe, thousand gallon, in-ground filtration, hexagonal aquarium in the sky? Jumbo was still in the cave, with just the ends of his long antennae poking out, waving like a conductor’s hands. We fished him out and put him in the smaller tank for questioning. He suddenly looked like an extremely shady character. He had long pincers. He was asocial. “I think Jumbo has issues,” I said. “I think he’s a killer.”
“But shrimp are scavengers,” Javier replied, a hint of confusion and uncertainty in his teacher voice. “And we got such a good deal on him.”
“I don’t care how cheap he was!” I said. “He’s a bad egg.”
This morning, we awoke to a gruesome scene. The smallest of the dumb, orange platys was dead. It had been cleaved in half and there was no question: it was the shrimp. Javier was horrified. Under his supposedly watchful care, ten little ones had been eaten. What kind of parent would he be? “I always had a feeling about that shrimp,” I said. “From now on, I’m going to pay attention to my gut. Now, what do you want for dinner? Scallops and Jumbo or Jumbo over rice?”
The Morning After
The other day, I opened The New Yorker's Fashion Issue and found the following
advertisement celebrating designer Kate Spade's 10th anniversary. The copy read:
We all dressed in giddy finery. Talk bubbled. Dear friends clasped hands and ran
through the crowd. A crazy jumble of bags and coats on the chesterfield.
Elizabeth Miller Bastos, a displaced Pittsburgher, currently lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Javier and an assortment of fish and plants. She daylights as a mid-level fundraising executive and moonlights as a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Appalachian Mountain Club Magazine, JewishHistory.com, Poetism.com and in Inkwell Magazine. She can be reached at seapup_3@juno.com.
