The Perfect End to 2020

I slept late this morning and woke up to my boyfriend Jon closing the bedroom door.

“Babe, we have a major problem. Green Apple is dead.”

In my sleep fog brain I could not process this news and at first thought he was trying to tell me Apple stocks had gone down.

“Cara’s fish. It’s dead. Face down in the rocks by the castle. It’s tail is up and it’s not moving. It’s crazy I’ve never seen anything like it. When I fed them it didn’t move.”

By this time I’m already up and getting dressed.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Does she know?”

And he tells me she’s happily playing a video game and has no idea.

Within 2 minutes of this news I’m out of bed and in my car headed to Petco wearing Jon’s oversized coat so I can sneak a new Green Apple fish back into the house.

Petco in Bridgeport opens at 10. I sit in the parking lot for 15 minutes and am the first one there when the doors are unlocked.

In and out in a few minutes I race home all the while giving the new fish an old school pep talk, the kind that more borders on threats, something like, “Listen fucker, you better be hardy because I do not have time to for this and you are going in that tank the moment we get home.”

By the look in his fish eyes I knew he understood how serious this was. He seemed up for the challenge.

On Christmas Eve Cara, my 8 year old daughter, was moved to tears when she woke to find her new fish and I was not about to let her Christmas miracle die in less than a week.

I get home and put the baggie of water under my coat. I tell Jon to take Cara upstairs for “some thing” and begin mouthing to Laura, my 15 year old daughter, “Green Apple is DEAD” and I show her the bag under my coat.

She is immediately an accomplice and doesn’t hesitate. I am at once proud of her and questioning her morals, but there is no time to think more on that matter.

We get to the tank and I tell her, “Jon said this fish is dead and stuck under the castle. I bought a net,” and I wave my new net in her face to retrieve the stiff fish body.

“Here hold the bag” and I shove the bag of fish in her hands and reach in the tank to move the castle and then faster than I can describe Green Apple jets out from under the castle and is ALIVE!!!

Laura and I shriek in surprise and then stare at the fish in the bag.

Now WTF do I do??

We are hysterical laughing but muted so not to get Cara to come downstairs. It’s surreal. we find ourselves hugging and joyful and staring at a fish tank, mesmerized by the life before us and the quandary we are now in.

I call Jon down to ask him crucial differences between alive and dead. It is determined quickly that he can never make any medical decisions for me and Laura is now in charge of all my healthcare moving forward.

We decide it’s not the new fishes fault that we are a house full of ridiculous people and so we add him to the tank.

Cara is so happy. She can’t figure it out though. The new fish is bigger than Green Apple, so it can’t be its baby. She has asked Lava Girl, our beta fish in another tank, if she saw anything but Lava Girl is not talking.

And so we go into New Year’s Eve with the miracle of Green Apple ? on our minds and the addition of an as yet to be named new fish.