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“Ten to fifteen percent water change,” says the pet shop guy. “Every two weeks or so. Pop some water conditioner in if you’re using tap water, chlorine’ll kill him.”
Achilles stoops, eye-level with the little fish. It paddles its fins in place, looking desolately bored.
“He doesn’t need… companions?” he asks.
“Oh, nah,” says the pet shop guy. “Bettas, they’re the lone wolf type. He'll probably attack them if you try and give him friends." He pauses. "Maybe eat them."
The fish is so unassuming in its little bowl. Decorative, really. Achilles tries to imagine it as a predator, pretty fins flaring as it bears down on an unsuspecting victim. "Will it need more room?" The bowl is probably only four or five times the size of the fish and whimsical coloured gravel takes up about a third of the space.
The pet shop guy laughs. "This fella? Nah. Easy fish, bettas." He taps the bowl. "Happy as a clam right where he is."
Once a day, Achilles drops a teaspoon of nondescript pellets into the bowl. The fish nibbles at them listlessly and lets the rest sink. At first Achilles simply lets this happen; after a few days, the waste is beginning to build. He takes to scooping the soggy food out with the net he got to remove the fish when he changes the water.
The fish, he soon notices, is constipated.
how often fish poop makes its way into his search history, followed by fish not pooping help.
You're overfeeding, Google informs him. Only feed your betta as much as he can eat in a few minutes. And, more troublingly: Decaying excess food can lead to ammonia poisoning.
Poisoning! Achilles mentally apologises to the fish, which does not hear him or care.
The night Achilles left, he forgot his shoes. He was halfway across the city before he realised he'd worn his house slippers into the Uber.
"One night stand gone wrong, eh, buddy?" chuckles the driver, and Achilles doesn't answer. His single bag feels startlingly light. Almost nothing to show for a life built together.
The stars are dim tonight, not nearly bright enough to see through the shock of traffic. He shuffles his feet in his soft slippers and stares out the window and wishes it would rain. The roar of passing cars and blaring truck horns aren't enough, alone, to drown out the memories playing themselves out in his mind, over and over until the mental tape wore down.
The fish is dying. Achilles had paid eight dollars fifty for him, bowl and all, and besides not a single vet was seeing fish.
"What's wrong with you?" Achilles asks him, and the fish does not hear him or care. He hangs quietly atop the stupid gravel, ignoring the now appropriate amount of food Achilles drops into the bowl for him, and does not even bother pacing the length of the tiny bowl the way he had in the early days. He does not look at all like the vicious predator he was billed to be.
His gills look like they're bleeding. A bout on his newly joined aquarium-focused Facebook groups confirms Achilles' creeping fears.
But I'm cleaning the uneaten food out of his bowl, he protests, so why is he still being poisoned? and is met with a barrage of WHY IS HE IN A BOWL??????
One trip to a dedicated aquarium store and three hundred dollars later, the fish is sitting quietly in a ten gallon tank with a brand new filter, a brand new heater, a stupid little silk plant and some considerably less stupid gravel. Achilles is the proud owner of a water testing kit he barely knows how to read. He'd failed chemistry in high school and would have done so a second time had Patroclus not taken pity on him.
Do you know about the nitrogen cycle? one particularly patient user had asked him, and then he'd been met with several hours of presumably stunned silence when he'd typed back What's Nitrogen again?
The nitrogen cycle: Ammonia, which is toxic to fish, needs to be built up so that nitrites, which are also toxic to fish, can build up and eat them, and then nitrates, which are less toxic to fish, can build up and eat those. Rinse and repeat—but when rinsing (your filter media), be sure to use only tank water, and definitely not tap water, because that would kill all the beneficial bacteria, and you might end up back at square one.
("What's filter media," Achilles asks at the end of this spiel, looking definitely at least as pathetic as he feels, and the shop attendant takes one look at him then takes pity and starts again.)
Given a few days of rigorous water testing and appropriate medicinal measures, the fish begins to swim again. Achilles conducts a fish-in cycle with newfound fire, changes the water often enough that the ammonia stays down, and the fish begins to recover. His gills return to normal, and Achilles breathes with him.
The fish eats, and begs for more in a fishy little way Achilles is coming to recognise, and Achilles denies him, because he is, after all, a fish, and does not know what is best for him.
At home, the bedside tables were where three things lived. The first was the lamp, which was shaped like a tulip, and which Patroclus used to read late into the night. He wore glasses now—probably a result of the fact that he read late into the night using a stupidly dim tulip lamp, and which Achilles had teased him for endlessly to disguise the unbearable softness that came with the fact that Patroclus could at any time have vacated to the living room to read and didn't. Achilles grew used to sleeping with the light at night, the same as he got used to resting his head against Patroclus' thigh.
The second was a frame, which housed two photographs and folded like a book. On the left was a group photo, originally of their college football team, folded to crop the two of them into the fore. Achilles is holding a trophy. Hands reach for him from the hidden side of the photo, but he ignores them, gleefully attempting to hoist a long-suffering Patroclus into the air. Four seconds after that photo was taken, he'd dropped Patroclus (who was after all much heavier than he was) and Patroclus had chipped his tooth on the trophy. On the right is a photo of Achilles being kissed by a seal at the aquarium.
The third item was on Achilles' side, and it was a potted succulent, the one and only plant in the apartment Achilles had been permitted to call his, which Achilles had watered and sung to diligently for two months before Patroclus had seen fit to inform him it was made of resin. The video of this event had become a fast favourite on Patroclus' Instagram.
The bedside table at his new apartment is unsanded, bare, and, technically, a crate. It was forty dollars on Facebook Marketplace. Achilles is wallowing too deep to acknowledge or care that he's been ripped off. He doesn't have a lamp. He does have a photo frame, which he purchased at the grocery store and currently features a piece of cardstock that says "4" x 6" photo frame - Memories" with a foolish little border around it. It's been banished to the pantry, where it equally has no place.
"If it had been real," Patroclus had conceded, behind the camera and stifling chuckles at Achilles, whom he said puffed up like a blowfish when offended, "you would have kept it alive. It's an effort to be commended, really," and Achilles had tried to take this to heart.
Fake plants are swapped out for real ones. Achilles reads about root tabs and liquid fertiliser. The ten gallon tank becomes home to an Amazon sword and java moss, both billed as almost unkillable. The fish hangs out in the leaves and swims in excited little patterns when Achilles approaches. Another slew of frantic Google searches informs him that the fish is simply happy to see him.
Overwhelmed with emotion, Achilles buys frozen bloodworms as a treat.
Where the little bowl had sat forlornly in the centre of the bedside crate, the tank is much too large. Achilles drags in a chest of drawers from a garage sale and finally stops storing his undershirts and briefs on a dining chair next to the window. The fish is indifferent to his new surroundings. Achilles watches him nose at a Marimo moss ball, which Achilles had ordered in a pack of five from a dubious seller on eBay.
The aquarium lights have been upgraded from the previous lighting setup, which had been nothing. The plants, however, necessitated something more sophisticated than the bedroom window, so Achilles had found a set of LEDs which ran on a timer. The new problem, though, was algae.
Less light, suggest the comments.
The plants need light.
Snails, one user suggests, and is immediately shot down in a frantic storm of ONLY SNAILS IF YOU WANT ONE HUNDRED SNAILS. Achilles, who does not want one hundred snails, persists in asking and eventually arrives at shrimp.
Bettas, he knows, sometimes eat shrimp. Although the fish does not seem particularly aggressive, perhaps this was simply due to a lack of appropriate prey. Perhaps, on introduction to a little colony of cherry shrimp (for it was not appropriate to own, at any time, less than ten) the fish would reveal its inner monster.
After checking and re-checking that the water parameters will happily host his new shrimp, Achilles gingerly introduces the squad to the fish. They scuttle immediately for cover beneath the friendly flowing leaves of the Amazon sword.
The fish spots one and darts for it with incredible ferocity. Achilles tenses, then watches in horror as the helpless shrimp scrambles to escape.
The fish then immediately loses interest and returns to nosing at the moss.
"Ah," says Achilles.
A shrimp has climbed the leaves of the Amazon sword and is attentively feeding on the surface of the sponge filter.
Within days, the algae bloom has begun to diminish. They also eagerly consume all the food that the fish doesn't eat, finally settling Achilles' fears of poisoning. Achilles notes, with a little spike of joy that makes him slightly nauseous, that two of the shrimp are 'berried'—that is, carrying eggs.
Bettas will eat shrimplets, the comments advise him.
He leaves my shrimp alone.
Some are like that, another user agrees. Mine don't bother my shrimp. But they will eat the babies. Get a breeding tank if you want to keep them.
The chest of drawers is big enough for another tank. Achilles gets another filter, keeps it in his first tank for a while to get the bacteria going, propagates his Amazon sword, and starts up a second tank over the next few weeks. The pregnant shrimp are separated away, and within days, dozens of baby shrimp are swimming dazedly through the leaves.
They didn't fight, really. Patroclus wasn't confrontational enough and even Achilles couldn't usually bring himself to shout, not at him. Still, it was palpable. Achilles found himself going out more and more, to run or fetch some made-up necessity from the store. The look on Patroclus' face whenever he left was so resigned. Something was dying in the rooms they occupied together and it was slowly poisoning the water supply.
Achilles loved him—loved him the way he'd never loved anyone, loved him in the kind of desperate way that hurt to dwell on. It was becoming abundantly clear, in an emergence of reality that Patroclus refused to acknowledge, that he could not stay. With each passing day he felt more caged, suffocating on rancid remnants of goodwill leeching into the space between them. The shuttered look on Patroclus' face at mealtimes, the quiet sigh whenever Achilles got another thing wrong. I'm allergic to daffodils, Achilles. But they were the only ones left at the store, and Achilles had forgotten.
Patroclus would never have asked him to leave, if they'd ever spoken about it. And they hadn't. Achilles had never brought it up, because he was afraid to be asked to stay.
Unable to part with the baby shrimp, Achilles resigns himself to maintaining two tanks at all times. Once the shrimp are large enough, a number of them are returned to the betta's tank to be reunited with their parent shrimp. Still more fall pregnant, and Achilles finds himself with two shrimp tank that house a fish rather than the other way around.
Sell them, the comments advise.
More tanks! the comments enthuse.
Caught between practical advice and blatant enabling, Achilles puts up a Marketplace listing for cherry shrimp (two dollars apiece, but you must take at least ten) and buys another betta for the second tank, a female this time. The two fish acknowledge each other through the glass. Achilles can't help but think they look rather lonely.
Can male female betta life together not kill, he searches, and is politely informed first that he has typed the question into the Facebook group and not Google, and second that a male and female betta can cohabit in the short term for breeding purposes, but that they shouldn't live together, because they would still likely hurt each other in the end.
Achilles digests this.
He's not sure he's ready for a breeding pair. He's overrun with shrimplets as it is and there's always the risk that the fish will simply kill each other and he'll be left without them.
A berried shrimp presses up against the glass and waves her little antenna at him as he thinks. Her eggs jiggle.
Achilles looks at the fish. The fish, being fish, do not look back.
"It's better this way," he tells them, and being fish, they do not hear him or care.
Achilles remade his socials, because he couldn't stand the constant prompting that he had a memory to look back on that day. Then he promptly had a panic attack at the thought of losing all those memories for good and spent twenty minutes in a Google spiral to find out that deactivated Facebook accounts were not gone for good and could be retrieved by simply logging back in.
The new apartment is so empty.
There's no carpet in the bedroom. It's timber, which is nice, but it's decidedly unfinished and the walls seem hollow. There's an echo.
Achilles subsists, his first few weeks, mostly on Subway sandwiches from the Subway downstairs and around the corner. The elevator is broken, so he takes the stairs. It gets to be a fairly expensive habit, but at least he's eating fresh(?). Achilles had taken very little in the way of utensils when he'd left. For one thing, such things were difficult to pack quietly. For another, they had owned one of each essential, and Achilles couldn't take more from Pat than he already had. He'd taken with him their life together; he could, at least, leave Patroclus a future and the spatula.
When budgetary concerns win out, dinner becomes tinned spaghetti.
Patroclus never calls him after he leaves. Achilles never expects him to. He'd closed the door himself, closed the book on the two of them, closed the photo frame on the bedside table and gently left it lying on its side. Patroclus was never the type to chase him down. If Achilles wanted to leave, he left. There was no catching him. No use keeping him, when he did not want to stay.
The tiredness in Patroclus' eyes, those last few months, was enough to tell Achilles that he'd stopped fighting for them. That he knew, one way or another, sooner or later, that it would sputter to an end, and that he simply had no energy to do anything but watch it slowly die.
In the new apartment, Achilles' thumb hovers over Patroclus' contact every night. He stays, frozen, until something compels him to put the phone back down.
His colours are fading. Is he sick?
Could be infection, muse the comments. Could be ich.
The fish's scales seem to be thinning. Achilles follows the general advice and quarantines the fish. Having nowhere else to put him, Achilles returns him to the little bowl in which he first came home.
"Sorry," he murmurs to the glass. "Just for a little while. Then you can go home."
The fish hangs around atop the gravel, listless.
The medicine Achilles tries doesn't seem to have any effect. The fish is as lethargic as ever, and his fins begin to grow ragged. Fin rot? Achilles asks anxiously, and the comments dither. Achilles tries one thing, and another. A white dot appears on the fish's head, and vanishes, and appears again. He's growing thinner.
Hey, buddy, says a user. Could just be old age.
I just got him a year ago.
How long was he in the shop?
Achilles doesn't answer. He's never thought about it.
He looks at his fish.
The fish usually wiggles when he sees Achilles approaching, but lately he doesn't seem to have the energy. He hangs in the water quietly, and doesn't react when Achilles drops food into his bowl.
"Come on," Achilles says softly. "Keep trying."
The fish does not hear him, or care.
In the morning, the fish is dead.
Achilles looks at the bowl for twenty minutes, standing in his briefs. He had expected the fish to be floating. He had expected, foolishly, a sign from the fish—something to let him know that the time had come.
The fish is still suspended where he was the day before, hovering a few millimetres from the gravel. He might be sleeping; only when Achilles touches him with the net, his gills aren't moving and his eyes are cloudy.
He hadn't even had a name.
This, more than anything else, is what finally breaks him. The fish had been Achilles' companion for over a year—his only companion, in the early days, and had tolerated all Achilles' ignorance, all his failures, and had persisted regardless. The fish had suffered when Achilles had been not bothered to make an effort. Yet, he wiggled when Achilles came near, knowing Achilles as the one who fed him and kept him healthy. He had stayed alive, willed by a simple urge to live, not knowing how to do anything else.
The toilet is an indignity. Achilles carries the fish in a matchbox to a nearby park—a park which, in all honesty, he hadn't even known existed until now. He finds a nice tree, then realises he had not brought a trowel, nor did he own one, and sets about digging a fish sized hole with a stick. It's slow work.
Then he plays Taps on his phone.
Halfway through the song, the self-consciousness begins to cut through his grief. There is, blessedly, no one else in the park. Yet the absurdity of what he's doing—holding a military funeral for a fish—a fish he had never even named—makes him clear his throat.
He kneels and places the fish gently into the grave. The soil is soft and damp, which he is glad for, increasingly aware that it probably would have made more sense to bury the fish at sea. (At pond.) He covers the fish and then, again at a loss but feeling like he ought to do something, glances around and finds a leaf, which he sticks somewhat gingerly into the mound. It waves in the air. It will doubtless vacate the scene at the first gentle breeze.
I ought to say something, thinks Achilles.
He clears his throat again.
"Goodbye," he says to the ground. His voice cracks.
The fish cannot hear him, nor care.
The walk back to his apartment is a lonely one now that he does not even have the dead fish to accompany him. The elevator is still broken. He climbs the stairs slowly, lost in thought, and almost climbs straight past his apartment.
When he enters his bedroom, the female betta wiggles in acknowledgement. Now truly alone, she does not seem to notice the absence of her would-be fish beau. The little bowl, now empty, rests on Achilles' bedside crate where it had a year ago, and where it had in the fish's last days.
Achilles looks at the bowl. Then he looks at the tanks on his chest of drawers. The shrimp (there are so many of them) wave at him. The female betta wiggles, impatient and hungry.
Achilles picks up his phone.