Fly away, Stanley, be free!

Island Packet — You try to be nice, you try to be a good parent, you put a fish tank in your kid’s room because you think it’ll teach valuable lessons about nature and pet care, and then the fish more or less all try to kill themselves. Great. THANKS, FISH.

Indeed, due to a recent flurry of housecleaning, the Little Man was given a fish tank from his grandparents, a large and serious-looking 30-gallon deal that required more effort than I’d ever put into a fish tank before, such as cleaning. In fact, quite a bit of preliminary work was required, as the current tenant was a sole and sickly-looking wretch named Booger who looked like a special new hybrid of goldfish and death. Booger needed help, and by “help” I mean “to be put out of his misery and onto a sandwich as quickly as possible.” (Sorry, but I really like seafood.)

Anyway, after a thorough scrubdown and comprehensive water replacement treatment, we set out to repopulate the tank at Wal-Mart, which was convenient, because we also totally needed sweatpants and a 70-gallon tankard of Tide. (Scoff if you will, but have you ever checked out Wal-Mart’s assortment of fish? It’s like those walls of TVs they have in NORAD, only instead of TVs, it’s fish. They have more fish at Wal-Mart than they have $5.50 horror DVDs from 1974.)

So with a sack of new fish in one hand and a piping hot new copy of “Santa’s Slay” in the other, we headed home to surprise Booger with some much-needed friends.

It’s around this point that the dying started.

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• Ralph Stanley – O Death

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