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Betta Test
The pinstripes on Joe's shirt scatter through the tank's glass. He is at the other end of the 60-gallon giant trying to straighten one of the tank's stands legs with his foot. He strains under the weighted fragility of the glass and pokes his tongue out from between his lips.
"Almost there," and his foot just nuzzles a doubled-up folded piece of cardboard on the floor. "Just need this for now." He looks at me. "You OK?"
My own lips taste a tiny bead of sweat that formed right above my lip. "Yeah, just hurry up."
Joe slaps his foot on top of the cardboard and pulls the piece next to the stand. With his knee he lifts the aquarium stand just a half-inch above the ground so that it falls neatly on the cardboard.
"OK, we can drop the tank now."
The stands rocks a little to the right, but Joe promises a permanent solution before completion.
Joe shoos me away and then slides the entire tank towards the back of the living room. The pine floors squeak as the metal footers dig into the veneer.
The noise brings our daughter Dana in from the kitchen. She gleams at the giant fish tank and immediately runs up to it slapping her hands on the polished glass.
"Oh, wow! This can hold a bunch of fishes right daddy?" Dana hugs one of the corners and tries to match the reflections of her palms from each side. Joe puts his hand on her stomach and shuffles her towards my legs. "Yes, honey, it can hold a lot of them, but don't touch it until daddy is done with the set-up." Joe never looks up from the tank, his hand pulling back once he felt my body push against it. "Kaia, can you go get one of the sacks of gravel from the garage?"
"The one leftover from when we made Neptune's home!?" Dana's own jubilation cuts my answer and she begins to run to the garage. The swish of the screen door announces her arrival.
Joe manages to look away from the tank and grimaces. "I don't want her wrecking this. She can go play with her own fish until this is done."
I wonder what a twenty pound bag of aquarium gravel would do to a seven-year old's back or about the various tools littering that spot on the storage shelf. I still make a response, tired of being in the dark. "And when will it be done?"
Joe cocks a smile and the bristle of his mustache pull away enough so i see the ends of his lips. "Soon! I need to run to the pet store though before the game tonight."
A metal clang comes from the garage followed immediately by Dana's muffled "I'm OK!"
Joe starts to walk in the opposite direction towards the wooden pegs by the door where we keep the keys. "Game? Tonight?"
"Poker game. I invited some of the guys from the office." Joe snatches his car keys.
Another metal clang only this time louder and then followed by the whining start of a sob.
"Aren't you forgetting something?" I pivot on my legs and begin to turn towards the garage. Joe comes from behind me and says, "Of course" before grabbing my hips and pulling me towards him. His kiss is nothing out of the ordinary, but his free hand runs on the back of my right thigh and quickly cups my ass. Dana begins to wail and I don't know how to react. Joe winks at me before letting me go and bolting for the door. The door slams. Dana keeps crying. The back of my legs tingle from where Joe pressed the folds of my jeans into them.
Dana calms down after I take her upstairs and put her in front of her own tiny aquarium. There I tell her a story about Neptune the goldfish's former life in a pond with always flowering swamp lilies. I tell her to write me something about Neptune, to watch his movements carefully and then tell me about them. It works with the kids at the school to unwind them after recess.
Handing her a piece of pink stationery paper from her tiny play desk I say, "We'll frame it and then put it by Neptune's tank."
Dana's face is still a bit red, but she smiles and grabs a purple magic marker that on her dresser. She takes her time looping the letters together to make the brief sentences.
Back downstairs I see where she banged her head against some shelving and the gravel behind a dusty string of Christmas lights. I pour the bag into the tank, but the layer lies thin over the bottom. I consider calling Joe to remind him off the color so that everything matches in this purchase, but ultimately hang up the phone before grabbing my own car keys.
I bring Dana on my Saturday errands. She hums the jingle to an used-car dealership ad we heard pulling out of the driveway. I keep thinking about Joe. About the fish tank, the poker game, and the grope. Before leaving the old job he told me he wanted more fun in this new city. Maybe that was it or that he was just excited by the new tank. Growing up on a farm his parents never let him have a fish. "We already got plenty of pets," he told me they would reply to his cries about buying an emaciated goldfish from the pet store window in town. He got Dana Neptune as soon as she even mentioned the word fish.
Dana keeps humming the jingle and I am happy we are almost done. I swing by the school to pick up a set of assignments I left on my desk. The security guard does not recognize me and only opens the gate once I threaten to call Principal Danvers at her home. Dana waits in the car and in my classroom I notice how late it got on the apple-shaped clock above the door. 5:32pm.
Back in the car I rip open a box of cookies once Dana says she hungry. The strip mall by the school features a small pet store, Pet Jungle, and I decided to pull in blaming Joe's actions on just plain excitement.
"How about we get something for Daddy's new fish tank?"
Dana wipes her mouth and gives me the whiplash inducing nods I believe only kids can give. "And something for Neptune's too!"
I nod, pulling into a space right by the store front.
A man walks out of the store with two baggies of those sullen beta fish as we enter. Inside I keep Dana close to me and away from all the distractions. I really just thought about a plastic plant or something. Dana waves to a golden lop rabbit in a dispaly by the aquarium decorations before the sheer selection overwhelms her. I grab a three for one pack filled with short, little squat shrubs with needle leaves. "This will do for daddy's tank." I press the container to my chest. Dana grabs a ceramic mermaid the size of a baseball glove and says, "Neptune would love this!"
"She is beautiful, honey, but she is bigger than Neptune's tank. Why not just a plant? Too remind Neptune of his pond. Remember?"
Dana pouts so that her lips leave a tiny shadow against her chin. "Ok." She spends a minute scanning the fake plants before settling on a pink and purple wispy reed with spatula shaped leaves.
At the check out counter another man buys a pair of beta fish.
"For your kids?" I ask him while the cashier fumbles with his credit card.
"No," he snarls back and then decides to just slap some cash on the counter.
Back home there are five men, excluding Joe, in the living room. He introduces them as buddies from the office and they all seem nice. Joe tells me that someone, Al, is upstairs using the bathroom, but he will be down in a minute. A quartet of pizza boxes lies on some newspaper on the couch. Some beer cans rest on the fold-out table. I hear footfalls on the stairs and turn to meet the man I can only imagine is Al.
It is the same man from the pet store. The man with the beta fish. He doesn't remember me and this time he comes off cordial. At the store i did not notice his height, but when i peer over his shoulder I see commotion in the fish tank. A glimmer of light and a brief splash. Squeezing though the boys to see the tank as a whole I see how Joe finished it while I was gone. A thicker layer of gravel, albeit a darker brown than the on I poured, rests on the bottom. Dozens of plants dot the gravel and sway with the currents kicked up by the fish. Rock piles dot barren areas of gravel without plants. Another brief glimpse of color comes at the corner of my eye. I turn to it and see a gossamer strand of bruised blue. A red and yellow beta fish darts past my eye sight followed by another one where the combination of red and yellow blends better into an orange sunset. All the fish are betas. A navy colored fish rams a purple one into a corner and keeps headbutting the other. The purple beta's gills flare open and close as it was gasping for real air. One of the boys squats next to me and looks up at Joe. "Looks like the purple one is going to get it."
I turn to Joe, but he doesn't see me. He carries a green skimmer net and one of the cue-ball sized bowls the betas come in. On the coffee stand I see two of those bowls each with a neat beta corpse lying in the moisture it carried away from the tank. I return to the tank and notice that it seems to shimmer from end to end. I press my own fingers to the tank and trace the brief starlight in the water before an umbre beta slams into the glass. Shrieking I lose my footing and fall back onto the floor.
It is one of Joe's friends that helps me up. "Don't worry about that. They sometimes even fight their own reflection." Joe has scooped the purple beta out of the tank and it completes it death throes in the smaller bowls. The friend notices the shock on my face. "Pretty sick, eh? It was your husband's idea. To give those beta a chance to do what they do. Told us he always really wanted a fish."
Joe never looks at me while his friend lifts me off the ground. I hear more footfalls from the stairs and see the laced hem of Dana's pajamas. I told her to change for bed before meeting her dad's friends. Joe's friend asks me something, maybe if I am OK, but I am already at the foot of the stairs and scooping Dana up into my arms. Running up the stairs she protests and the boys below holler at the battle royal.
In her room I lie to Dana and invoke the catch-all of "adult time" when she asks why she can't b downstairs.
"We'll have fun up here," and I pull the plants out of the pet store bag, which was looped around my wrist. She drops her selection in first and sits back to take the new tankscape in. Neptune comes from one of the corners of his five gallon home and circles the incomprehensibly colored plant. Dana smiles and then I had her the three plants I bought for Joe's tank.
"Aren't these for daddy's fish?"
I grab her wrist and together bring the fake shrubbery to the skin of the water. "He won't mind." We drop the plant in and sink it towards the gravel.
After installing the plants I ask Dana to read me the story she wrote about Neptune. It is three sentences long, but she insists on making a sudden addendum to account for Neptune's new forest. I don't notice when she falls asleep, but I also fall asleep in her room after watching Neptune duck in and out of his plants. The starlight in his tank is concentrated, more like a comet than a shower.
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Ok, well the idea was the betta battle royal and I am happy I finally got to it with this draft. Of course this is a hurried first draft, but I have my skeleton there. Being of the Palahniuk influence I identify with the absent father and the omnipresent mother. I want any draft of this final story to deal with masculinity, something I often write about, probably because of my lack of its traditional form. Peace!
"Almost there," and his foot just nuzzles a doubled-up folded piece of cardboard on the floor. "Just need this for now." He looks at me. "You OK?"
My own lips taste a tiny bead of sweat that formed right above my lip. "Yeah, just hurry up."
Joe slaps his foot on top of the cardboard and pulls the piece next to the stand. With his knee he lifts the aquarium stand just a half-inch above the ground so that it falls neatly on the cardboard.
"OK, we can drop the tank now."
The stands rocks a little to the right, but Joe promises a permanent solution before completion.
Joe shoos me away and then slides the entire tank towards the back of the living room. The pine floors squeak as the metal footers dig into the veneer.
The noise brings our daughter Dana in from the kitchen. She gleams at the giant fish tank and immediately runs up to it slapping her hands on the polished glass.
"Oh, wow! This can hold a bunch of fishes right daddy?" Dana hugs one of the corners and tries to match the reflections of her palms from each side. Joe puts his hand on her stomach and shuffles her towards my legs. "Yes, honey, it can hold a lot of them, but don't touch it until daddy is done with the set-up." Joe never looks up from the tank, his hand pulling back once he felt my body push against it. "Kaia, can you go get one of the sacks of gravel from the garage?"
"The one leftover from when we made Neptune's home!?" Dana's own jubilation cuts my answer and she begins to run to the garage. The swish of the screen door announces her arrival.
Joe manages to look away from the tank and grimaces. "I don't want her wrecking this. She can go play with her own fish until this is done."
I wonder what a twenty pound bag of aquarium gravel would do to a seven-year old's back or about the various tools littering that spot on the storage shelf. I still make a response, tired of being in the dark. "And when will it be done?"
Joe cocks a smile and the bristle of his mustache pull away enough so i see the ends of his lips. "Soon! I need to run to the pet store though before the game tonight."
A metal clang comes from the garage followed immediately by Dana's muffled "I'm OK!"
Joe starts to walk in the opposite direction towards the wooden pegs by the door where we keep the keys. "Game? Tonight?"
"Poker game. I invited some of the guys from the office." Joe snatches his car keys.
Another metal clang only this time louder and then followed by the whining start of a sob.
"Aren't you forgetting something?" I pivot on my legs and begin to turn towards the garage. Joe comes from behind me and says, "Of course" before grabbing my hips and pulling me towards him. His kiss is nothing out of the ordinary, but his free hand runs on the back of my right thigh and quickly cups my ass. Dana begins to wail and I don't know how to react. Joe winks at me before letting me go and bolting for the door. The door slams. Dana keeps crying. The back of my legs tingle from where Joe pressed the folds of my jeans into them.
Dana calms down after I take her upstairs and put her in front of her own tiny aquarium. There I tell her a story about Neptune the goldfish's former life in a pond with always flowering swamp lilies. I tell her to write me something about Neptune, to watch his movements carefully and then tell me about them. It works with the kids at the school to unwind them after recess.
Handing her a piece of pink stationery paper from her tiny play desk I say, "We'll frame it and then put it by Neptune's tank."
Dana's face is still a bit red, but she smiles and grabs a purple magic marker that on her dresser. She takes her time looping the letters together to make the brief sentences.
Back downstairs I see where she banged her head against some shelving and the gravel behind a dusty string of Christmas lights. I pour the bag into the tank, but the layer lies thin over the bottom. I consider calling Joe to remind him off the color so that everything matches in this purchase, but ultimately hang up the phone before grabbing my own car keys.
I bring Dana on my Saturday errands. She hums the jingle to an used-car dealership ad we heard pulling out of the driveway. I keep thinking about Joe. About the fish tank, the poker game, and the grope. Before leaving the old job he told me he wanted more fun in this new city. Maybe that was it or that he was just excited by the new tank. Growing up on a farm his parents never let him have a fish. "We already got plenty of pets," he told me they would reply to his cries about buying an emaciated goldfish from the pet store window in town. He got Dana Neptune as soon as she even mentioned the word fish.
Dana keeps humming the jingle and I am happy we are almost done. I swing by the school to pick up a set of assignments I left on my desk. The security guard does not recognize me and only opens the gate once I threaten to call Principal Danvers at her home. Dana waits in the car and in my classroom I notice how late it got on the apple-shaped clock above the door. 5:32pm.
Back in the car I rip open a box of cookies once Dana says she hungry. The strip mall by the school features a small pet store, Pet Jungle, and I decided to pull in blaming Joe's actions on just plain excitement.
"How about we get something for Daddy's new fish tank?"
Dana wipes her mouth and gives me the whiplash inducing nods I believe only kids can give. "And something for Neptune's too!"
I nod, pulling into a space right by the store front.
A man walks out of the store with two baggies of those sullen beta fish as we enter. Inside I keep Dana close to me and away from all the distractions. I really just thought about a plastic plant or something. Dana waves to a golden lop rabbit in a dispaly by the aquarium decorations before the sheer selection overwhelms her. I grab a three for one pack filled with short, little squat shrubs with needle leaves. "This will do for daddy's tank." I press the container to my chest. Dana grabs a ceramic mermaid the size of a baseball glove and says, "Neptune would love this!"
"She is beautiful, honey, but she is bigger than Neptune's tank. Why not just a plant? Too remind Neptune of his pond. Remember?"
Dana pouts so that her lips leave a tiny shadow against her chin. "Ok." She spends a minute scanning the fake plants before settling on a pink and purple wispy reed with spatula shaped leaves.
At the check out counter another man buys a pair of beta fish.
"For your kids?" I ask him while the cashier fumbles with his credit card.
"No," he snarls back and then decides to just slap some cash on the counter.
Back home there are five men, excluding Joe, in the living room. He introduces them as buddies from the office and they all seem nice. Joe tells me that someone, Al, is upstairs using the bathroom, but he will be down in a minute. A quartet of pizza boxes lies on some newspaper on the couch. Some beer cans rest on the fold-out table. I hear footfalls on the stairs and turn to meet the man I can only imagine is Al.
It is the same man from the pet store. The man with the beta fish. He doesn't remember me and this time he comes off cordial. At the store i did not notice his height, but when i peer over his shoulder I see commotion in the fish tank. A glimmer of light and a brief splash. Squeezing though the boys to see the tank as a whole I see how Joe finished it while I was gone. A thicker layer of gravel, albeit a darker brown than the on I poured, rests on the bottom. Dozens of plants dot the gravel and sway with the currents kicked up by the fish. Rock piles dot barren areas of gravel without plants. Another brief glimpse of color comes at the corner of my eye. I turn to it and see a gossamer strand of bruised blue. A red and yellow beta fish darts past my eye sight followed by another one where the combination of red and yellow blends better into an orange sunset. All the fish are betas. A navy colored fish rams a purple one into a corner and keeps headbutting the other. The purple beta's gills flare open and close as it was gasping for real air. One of the boys squats next to me and looks up at Joe. "Looks like the purple one is going to get it."
I turn to Joe, but he doesn't see me. He carries a green skimmer net and one of the cue-ball sized bowls the betas come in. On the coffee stand I see two of those bowls each with a neat beta corpse lying in the moisture it carried away from the tank. I return to the tank and notice that it seems to shimmer from end to end. I press my own fingers to the tank and trace the brief starlight in the water before an umbre beta slams into the glass. Shrieking I lose my footing and fall back onto the floor.
It is one of Joe's friends that helps me up. "Don't worry about that. They sometimes even fight their own reflection." Joe has scooped the purple beta out of the tank and it completes it death throes in the smaller bowls. The friend notices the shock on my face. "Pretty sick, eh? It was your husband's idea. To give those beta a chance to do what they do. Told us he always really wanted a fish."
Joe never looks at me while his friend lifts me off the ground. I hear more footfalls from the stairs and see the laced hem of Dana's pajamas. I told her to change for bed before meeting her dad's friends. Joe's friend asks me something, maybe if I am OK, but I am already at the foot of the stairs and scooping Dana up into my arms. Running up the stairs she protests and the boys below holler at the battle royal.
In her room I lie to Dana and invoke the catch-all of "adult time" when she asks why she can't b downstairs.
"We'll have fun up here," and I pull the plants out of the pet store bag, which was looped around my wrist. She drops her selection in first and sits back to take the new tankscape in. Neptune comes from one of the corners of his five gallon home and circles the incomprehensibly colored plant. Dana smiles and then I had her the three plants I bought for Joe's tank.
"Aren't these for daddy's fish?"
I grab her wrist and together bring the fake shrubbery to the skin of the water. "He won't mind." We drop the plant in and sink it towards the gravel.
After installing the plants I ask Dana to read me the story she wrote about Neptune. It is three sentences long, but she insists on making a sudden addendum to account for Neptune's new forest. I don't notice when she falls asleep, but I also fall asleep in her room after watching Neptune duck in and out of his plants. The starlight in his tank is concentrated, more like a comet than a shower.
________________________________________________
Ok, well the idea was the betta battle royal and I am happy I finally got to it with this draft. Of course this is a hurried first draft, but I have my skeleton there. Being of the Palahniuk influence I identify with the absent father and the omnipresent mother. I want any draft of this final story to deal with masculinity, something I often write about, probably because of my lack of its traditional form. Peace!
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