It is Fall and each morning I look out through the bars of my back door to a blaze of red-orange. One tree is going up and out in a burst of flames. Death is a many-splendored thing.
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My goldfish died this morning.
I found him floating, bent in rigormortis in the blue mason jar that was his most recent home. He had survived the destruction of two others, the fangs of a cat, countless excursions into the air when I cleaned his home, not to mention endless hours sloshing back and forth in his aquarium as I moved to yet another place. Needless to say, it had not been an easy life for a fish, but I guess I had always expected him to be around. He had outlived two other fish who had died from disease since a friend had walked into my dorm room and gave him to me almost five years ago.
I will miss him. I will miss the way he wriggled when I came close and how he would watch me as I moved around the room. David; Beloved, survivor, wanderer, my familiar, seer of many places, symbol of something precious in me. He had never gotten very big and unlike most goldfish and the flaming tree out back, he was never orange. Rather, he was a pale, almost luminous, pink and when I found him today, he more resembled the crescent of a morning moon than a goldfish.
I wanted to give him a decent burial, a proper one to send him on his way to that other more calm sea, a ceremonial dump into a pond, lake, stream or even a puddle. Something fitting for a hardy fish. In the end, I settled on the closest thing; that cemetery of porcelain for all dead pet fish it seems. It was the best I could do, but I did feel a pang of guilt when I poured him in and pulled the chain. And as he was washed away in that yellow sea on his final journey, I wondered if the inner twinge had been guilt or the death of some scaly swimmer in me.
Later, in the kitchen, when I looked for the familiar orange flames of the tree out back, I noticed that there were only a few, rather dull, pale-pink leaves remaining and mostly bare, naked branches silhouetted against the ashen sky.
November 19 & 22, 1991
