{"id":6399,"date":"2012-05-26T19:15:12","date_gmt":"2012-05-27T02:15:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/blog\/?p=6399"},"modified":"2012-05-26T19:20:31","modified_gmt":"2012-05-27T02:20:31","slug":"goldfish-the-unspeakable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/?p=6399","title":{"rendered":"goldfish the unspeakable"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago Mary brought her Western pond turtle inside and upstairs to show me.\u00c2\u00a0 “I think he’s dead,” she said sadly.\u00c2\u00a0 She had found him drifting at an angle at mid-depth in his backyard home, a big Rubbermaid horse trough.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 No clue as to what had happened or how long ago.\u00c2\u00a0 He sure looked lifeless.<\/span><\/p>\n

After commiserating (she’s had that turtle for over two years, from the size of a fifty-cent piece), I said, “Well, let’s not assume anything.”\u00c2\u00a0 Figuring there was nothing to lose if I didn’t make things worse, I held him on one upturned palm and gently tugged on one foreleg, then the other.\u00c2\u00a0 Pretty limp, and no reflexive withdrawing into the shell as would be normal.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I stroked the top of his head from back to front, then under his chin (?).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Tugged on his legs again.\u00c2\u00a0 Head moved a bit!\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Pulled his back legs.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 From that point, every time I pulled on a leg there was a slight resistance, pulling back.<\/span><\/p>\n

After a while he started moving his legs a little on his own.\u00c2\u00a0 Mary put him in his “winter home,” a 15-gal aquarium, with a quarter-inch of water in it.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 He recovered, and the next day she put him back in the horse trough in the yard.\u00c2\u00a0 He seems fine now and spends most days basking\u00c2\u00a0in the sun\u00c2\u00a0on his rock.<\/span><\/p>\n

The whole episode reminded me of “Bugs’s out-of-bowl experience” years ago, when Ben and I returned home one afternoon to find his very defunct-looking goldfish on the dining room’s hardwood floor.\u00c2\u00a0 Back in the bowl (seemingly an ex-goldfish), after 30 minutes he was swimming disorientedly around.\u00c2\u00a0 After several hours he seemed none the worse for wear and lived to a ripe old age.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe the lesson is:\u00c2\u00a0 If the situation looks beyond hope, ask what you would do if it isn’t as final as it looks?\u00c2\u00a0 Then do that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, Bugs wasn’t quite the fish we remembered him being.<\/p>\n

Blind in both eyes, he now had an unnatural sense to him, as if his lifeless eyes had been somehow transformed into something… other…<\/p>\n

He gaped at us when we’d come in the room, seemingly begging for a death denied him. He lingered that way for almost ten years, and every day of that span his sickening presence grew. I shudder now to think of it…<\/p>\n

He sits now even as I write above me, on a shelf in a pickling jar, swimming, eternally swimming, in a specimen bottle… waiting, silently, an eternity if necessary, the day of his release, the end to his imprisonment.<\/p>\n

Is that the lesson, George? Perhaps none of us can really say… I cannot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago Mary brought her Western pond turtle inside and upstairs to show me.\u00c2\u00a0 “I think he’s dead,” she said sadly.\u00c2\u00a0 She had found him drifting at an angle at mid-depth in his backyard home, a big Rubbermaid horse trough.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 No clue as to what had happened or how long ago.\u00c2\u00a0 He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stardate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6399"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6402,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6399\/revisions\/6402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ikillspies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}