FishbowlTales

Emma found her pet fish, Sunshine, floating in the murky bowl on her dresser.

The wailing went on for a couple of days.  "Please don't take her away, Momma, please!  Why didn't Hannah's fish die?  Her fish is older and the water was dirtier.  I just changed mine."

"Are you sure it wasn't last week, Emma?" her mother said.  Our daughter-in-law explained that no living thing can last forever, and she was proud of the way Emma had taken care of Sunshine.  "We can't keep her in your room any longer.  The water's starting to smell."

"OK, let's bury her."

"We can't do that right now.  The ground's frozen and we can't dig."

"Well, let's put her in the freezer till we can bury her."

"Not with our food, Emma."

"Then I'll wrap her up and put her in a box in the basement."

"No, the box would begin to stink up the basement."

"Well, I'm not going to flush her down the toilet!"

After another day, even Emma couldn't stand the smell in her room.  She said a few sentences over the toilet bowl and Sunshine was on her way to sewer heaven.

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Little Maria was in the bathtub before her bedtime story.  When her mother went into Maria's room to grab her pajamas, something shiny caught her eye.

"Oh good heavens," Julia said to herself, poking the floating tail with a pencil .  "Looks like Hubert bit the dust!  I'd better ask John what to do."

With Maria still in the bathtub, the parents conferred outside the bathroom door. They decided to put a towel over the fishbowl.  "It has to be totally dark for Hubert to get to sleep," Maria's mother told her. "And you should be in bed now, too."

While Julia read to her daughter, John was on a mission to Petco.  He returned with a fish the same size as Hubert in a baggie.  After Maria had fallen asleep, her parents waited two hours. Then John removed the bowl from her room, changed the water, and flushed Hubert, Sr., down the toilet. Hubert, Jr., had found a new home.

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In his pre-teen years our son Todd used all his allowance money to buy a tank, water pump, and accessories for an exotic fish.  He could only afford one fish, since they ran $20 or more apiece and it took him a while to save the money.  The plan was to have a collection.

Despite the good care he gave the dazzling blue specimen, Todd found it floating on top of the tank one day.  He replaced it with another exotic, after he'd saved another $20.  This one was yellow with black stripes.

Eventually it, too, was floating on top of the tank.  Charley and I consulted the pet store people and chipped in for water purifiers.  When Todd had saved another $20, he bought a bright green specimen that looked more like a frog.

It, too, followed its predecessors down the toilet.

At which point we bought an Airedale.