Miss Grosvenor’s Goldfish

Is there any creature on Earth who experiences as much abject suffering as the common classroom pet? Looking back, the elementary school experience hardly seems incomplete without a small animal tragedy of some description, either repressed or remembered as comedy.

Miss Grosvenor meant well, but she was very young and hardly knew how to teach; much less keep a goldfish. Maybe, if she had been given more years to learn and settle into her job, then her skills in both areas would have improved. There was the potential for a middleaged Miss Grosvenor helming a third-grade classroom with a large and vibrant community aquarium. But that was not the case yet.

Bubbles lived in a plastic drum bowl by the window, so that the light trickled in when the window-blinds were open, filling the bowl with a dull and cloudy glow. The color of his gravel was neon rainbow, the plastic plant which loomed over him was birthday-cake-puke pink. Bubbles lived in a technicolor hell.

By the end of the first quarter, the students were already debating among themselves who would get to take Bubbles home. Miss Grosvenor told them that whoever was the best behaved would be able to have him, as long as their parents agreed. And as the conversation turned to misremembered care advice, both children and teacher were too busy talking to notice that Bubbles had stopped hanging listlessly at the top of his tank, and had instead swum over to the side of the bowl closest to them, listening intently.

The kids were put to work in group activities, and Miss Grosvenor stepped out in the hall to walk down to the supply room. The door swung shut behind her, and the sound of her footsteps faded as she walked briskly down the hallway. When she was gone, the kids began to laugh and talk loudly among themselves, getting up and darting between

| Sara Thompson tables. They had been warned not to be naughty, but what good is a warning that can’t be enforced?

“Kids!” a man’s voice called out. The classroom ground to a halt.

“Who said that?” said one boy, putting down his marker.

“I did,” said Bubbles.

Immediately, every kid in the class jumped from their seats and ran over to the table where Bubbles’ bowl sat, crowding around him in a sea of giant, grinning faces. Bubbles floated in the center of his bowl, his fins flared around him, hanging in the center of the water column as he addressed the class in a deep baritone voice.

“Bubbles, you can talk!” a girl squealed, springing forward to hug the bowl. The water sloshed.

“Let go, please,” said Bubbles, bumping into the side of the bowl. “Of course I can talk. I’ve always been able to talk.”

“I knew it!” said a tall, curly-haired boy. “Why didn’t you talk before?”

“I haven’t felt like it,” said Bubbles. “But now I think I do.”

“Then you’ll be our friend,” said the same little girl, who was still stroking the side of the bowl. “A friend forever?”

“A friend forever,” Bubbles said, sinking down to the bottom. “Of course.”

He then fell silent again, for five, six, seven seconds, until Miss Grosvenor re-entered the room. When she did, the kids ran to her, tugging at her shirt and demanding that she come and see how Bubbles had talked to them. At first she thought it was some kind of fairy tale, a story they had all made up to prank her somehow. But with the entire class very insistent on what had happened, she acquiesced and walked over to the tank to see what all the fuss was about.

Bubbles sat on the bottom of the tank,

underneath his plastic plant. He stared out at the world with big emotionless fish eyes. The kids tapped the bowl, trying to get him to speak again, but he didn’t. Eventually, the teacher crouched down slightly, to put herself on eye level with the fish, still expecting some kind of prank.

“You!” Bubbles shouted.

Miss Grosvenor screamed and jumped away from the tank. Bubbles swam over to the cloudy plastic side of the bowl, staring down at her with eyes incapable of blinking.

“You’re the one!” he said. “You’re my tormentor!”

“Oh my God!” screamed Miss Grosvenor.

“Every day of my life I live in pain because of you!” said Bubbles, lashing his tail. “Every day of my life I wonder if I’ll die because of you! What kind of life is it anyway, living in fear of being flushed away half-alive, of being replaced with a new fish, of being too afraid to die and too injured to want to live?”

“The fish can talk!” Miss Grosvenor said. “Oh my God, the fish can talk!”

“So often I felt helpless, helpless to do anything to save myself from this situation,” Bubbles continued. “And that’s what the worst part is, the helplessness of finding yourself at the mercy of a greater creature, hoping and praying for a mercy that would never come, because you are like a God to me . . .”

Miss Grosvenor got up and ran from the room, and Bubbles again fell silent, only swimming in slow circles to indicate his seething anger. The kids were no longer laughing. They were no longer attempting to approach the bowl. They sat riveted in their seats, eyes locked on the fish. Bubbles had achieved what Miss Grosvenor could not; he had managed to make twenty eight year olds sit still and be quiet.

“I’m telling you, it spoke with a man’s voice,” said Miss Grosvenor, as she walked in with the assistant principal. She was sweating madly and on the verge of hysterics at the mindbending encounter she had just experienced. The assistant principal was every bit as skeptical as she had been, when the students had first reported the story to her. They walked over to the bowl, where Bubbles was quietly swimming.

“Go on,” said the teacher. “Talk.”

Bubbles only spat a little bubble from his mouth.

“Do it,” said Miss Grosvenor. “I know you can.”

Bubbles did nothing but continue to swim.

They stood for a few moments watching him swim, and nothing broke the expectant silence but the ragged breathing of the humans. Then the assistant principal took Miss Grosvenor by the arm.

“Let’s go down to my office,” he said. “I have to make a few calls.”

Bubbles never spoke again, though Miss Grosvenor insisted to the psychiatrists in the hospital that he would if only they would bring him to her. When the janitor who had been tasked with cleaning out Miss Grosvenor’s room to prepare it for a new teacher found Bubbles’ bowl still sitting on the back of the table by the window, he thought at first that there was no life present in the neglected and slime-covered water. But when he held it up to the light, he could see Bubbles’ red-streaked gills still pumping softly, as if the tenacious little fish had still had an ounce of life left in him. Taking the bowl out back behind the school, he cradled it in his arms as he walked across the playground, careful not to splash any of the nasty water on himself. And kneeling by a shallow drainage creek at the edge of the property, he poured the bowl out into the swiftlymoving water, which carried its contents away.