Death Of A Fish

When fish die, you don't really notice or care. Unless they're in your aquarium. Then you at least notice. It's nothing that you get too broken up over. Probably if it cost $100 and you bought it yesterday, that'd be a different story.

We had a big fish that was dead today. By big I mean relatively big, five inches or so. It was called a Talking Catfish. I never heard it say anything, but this other person says she heard it croaking out a few syllables of some sort.

It wasn't a fish I noticed very much. Whether it hides or just stays in the background somewhere, it's always something of a surprise to see it at all. But yesterday it was swimming toward the top of the tank, like it was sucking air out of the surface. I called attention to it, that something funky was going on with that fish. Maybe it was dying. Turns out it was two years old.

Then today I looked and it was dead, at the bottom of the tank. So it was retrieved and flushed down the toilet.

When they catch fish -- I saw it on TV -- they catch them by the millions at a time. Then they're sliced and diced and iced, bing bang boom. No one cares about the individual fish. But each single fish is definitely, obviously a single little life. So it's something at least that they live and die.