Blue Gouramis

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by Kathryn Petruccelli

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They spit at me again. These fish show no sign of civility.

Only a few weeks back, my time at the tank involved watching the yellow snail—our sole survivor—glide from rock to rock. It kept the tank clean. At the time, all I could think to do was yawn. “We need some fish.”

There had been a mishap with the heater. The neon tetras, the algae eaters, the mollies with their gold fan tails: goners. The tiny African dwarf frogs my kids had talked us into—blanched and belly up on the bottom.

Foreheads pressed to the glass of the pet store’s aquarium, we’re immediately infatuated with what we’re told are blue gouramis. Size of the heel of your hand, their silvery-turquoise hue deepens and fades by turns along sides trimmed in tangerine, hinting of further magic.

Turns out, the gouramis think quite a bit of themselves as well. We’ve since read that they get along with drab, bland fish, but tend to attack anything colorful. Seems they need to be the most beautiful creature in the tank.

A young clerk stands by in dispassionate cool, her pink, asymmetrical hair hanging into her eyes, a la fashions of my youth.

Back then, a different girl floated to the top on the regular; the popular crowd going through friends like water. At dances, slipping out past the crowd primping in the bathroom mirror, I was a glimpse of jean jacket, not more. Barely able to live in my own skin, I made sure to have alternative tasks like cleaning the gym after the dance, while the predictable girls sparkled and flounced, competed for who was cutest.

Once, donning a new rhinestone-trimmed skirt I tucked into a corner as the music swelled. I was too early. Conspicuous. Girls surrounded me. “Wow, you look so…nice.” They trailed away, tittering. Pity or mockery, it hardly mattered. My lungs struggled to operate, like I was breathing under water.

I didn’t know then that only another year on, as I was finding my way amidst various college work study jobs, pacing myself through philosophy class, negotiating steadily with financial aid, one of those giggling girls would fail out of her freshman year. Or while my college friends and I bought all the goth jewelry we could afford to wear to the honors’ dance, a second of those cool chicks would leave her campus for unknown reasons and plant herself on a hometown barstool, seemingly for good. I didn’t wish them ill fortune, just wondered whether my own was taking a turn.

Her eyeliner curated into something resembling a fin, the pet store clerk plunges a net into the wee ecosystem and retrieves two gouramis.

At home, they try to eat the fake plant. By “try to eat” I mean they grab it and swim backwards like they’re participants in a strong-fish competition. “Maybe we don’t have the right food,” I worry. The pet store recommends dried blood worms.

All information about blue gouramis includes the same message: they’ll eat anything. What’s left out is that they’ll eat anything and everything, all the time.

The African dwarf frogs (may they rest in peace) required a signature before I brought them home saying I understood they could give me a disease. But the frogs seemed no more likely to infect me with some weird aquatic malady than whatever might be living in the mug of old tea next to my sink. These gouramis? Wouldn’t put it past them.

We’re burning through the blood worms. Further, the snail has been accosted on numerous occasions during its slow traverse tidying a path across the glass. Clueless regarding the hierarchy it’s part of, it dares live.

These days, the gouramis flash and dash while I focus on my yellow snail friend, its little sun of a shell, filled with new respect. We learn so slowly, the human animal. Decades and I still almost missed it. How dignity can bloom by slow turns. How something beautiful can devour. How the hapless can shine.

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