The fish on the sink


Dear unknown friend,


Where were you?

I was a little boy, maybe 8 years old. I had a great admiration for my uncle Raymond. He always arrived late for Sunday lunches when the family was gathering at my grandparents. Instead of wearing dull and stiff Sunday clothing, he turned up in sportswear, sweating and went for a shower. From the point of view of a little boy who would be sternly told off for being two minutes late this meant great freedom.

Raymond was a fisherman. I was fascinated looking at the big fish he brought and left to die a slow and distressing death on the kitchen sink. They were barbels and so full of bones that my grandmother never prepared them.
It takes hours for a fish to die. Paying close attention I could feel the exhaustion that squashed them and kept them quiet whilst the agony of being out of the water slowly built up enough strength for just another hopeless spasm… Flap! Flap flap! …. And they were quiet again, though I knew they weren’t dead and I somehow felt how they felt. 



I was bewildered by the complete indifference of the family to the intense suffering that was going on in the kitchen. They were eating and talking as if nothing, it was Sunday, they had been to mass…. You know, mass: Christian values, stories of heaven and hell, or being good, of Jesus multiplying fish and dying a slow and painful death because of our sins...

It didn’t occur to me to protest or express anything about how I felt about these fish. I didn’t occur to me that feelings could be heard. It didn’t occur to me that I was a fish. One day I insisted enough to be given the smallest one, a little carp that could fit in a jar. I brought it back at my parents’ home at night. The poor saved fish was put in a yellow plastic bathtub in the cellar where it could swim. I had a feeling of great isolation at looking at this fish, alone in an environment reduced to yellow plastic walls. But there was water, and I liked the animal…
A few weeks later we went on holidays. Sitting behind in the family car on the way South, I suddenly remembered the fish. I thought we would take it and put it in a river before going, but I had just forgotten. I asked my parents to go back home for the fish. They didn’t want to.

Several weeks later, I would find the fish, dry, laying on the concrete, two meters or so away from the plastic bathtub.

It had jumped. I imagined the immense distress a fish might feel, all alone in an environment as poor as a yellow plastic bathtub with nothing in it can be, jump into the unknown… just to die a slow death of the same kind you were saved by a small boy who shouldn’t have…

I felt so sorry... 




Comments

  1. Thank you. Yes it is sad. Hopefully I got a lesson. We should strive not to cause suffering...

    ReplyDelete
  2. And yes ..I feel like a fish out of beauty with scales falling like stars from my eyes.I thirst

    ReplyDelete

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