Day of Death

You were lost and gone forever, oh my darlin' Clementine...

Last week Blake and I bought goldfish. They're not just any goldfish either. They're extremely fat, unbalanced goldfish. I named mine Clementine because it was roughly the shape and color of a ripe clementine. Blake named his Orangina because (you guessed it) it was the color of orangina --although, not the shape of orangina.

I was excited to be a pet owner.

Yesterday, I sat down at my computer to write a blog post about my new fish. I had the picture and was about halfway through writing it, when I got on a tangent and decided that I was going to be a good pet owner and change the water in the fish bowl for the first time. So, I put my writing aside and scooped the fishbowl up and headed to the kitchen. I cleaned the bowl, put new water in and put the fish in and brought them back to my room.

I sat down at my desk to continue writing.

Ten minutes later I noticed that Orangina and Clementine were floating, belly-up in their bowl. Not just belly-up, but belly-up-and-out. Their stomachs were so huge that they were floating well-above the water...like little blimps that had tried to do a loop-the-loop and gotten stuck.

I saw that they were still breathing, so for a long while I tried to revive them. I thought the water might be too warm, so I put ice cubes in the water. I thought they might not have enough oxygen, so I took a straw and blew bubbles into the bowl.

Then I gave up.

Then I had to flush them down the toilet.

Then I was very sad.

Then I erased the blog post about how I was such a good pet owner.

**********

A couple hours later, I went out to my balcony to sit on my new chairs and to admire the new lantern and candle that I'd set up. The candle, which was brand new on Monday, had melted in the hot sun. Now it's bent.

Now it looks like this:

I kill fish, and I kill candles too.