When Rob and I moved into our house, the people who lived here before us not only left the motherfucking vine, but they also left fish. Three of them. In an aquarium. This seems perhaps slightly less odd once you know that one of the walls in our house has a built-in aquarium, and so without water and fish in it, this space looks rather stupid. I'd like to believe they were thinking of that when they left the fish, but considering this wall aquarium is in the basement and thus no one ever sees it, I suspect they were just fucking tired of taking care of the damn fish.

Since the fish were in the basement, I never remembered to feed them. We only go down there once a week to do laundry, and so once a week was precisely how often the fish got fed. Finally I decided to remove the tank from the wall and bring it upstairs into the dining room so that I would actually remember to feed the fish and so that we could actually enjoy seeing them.

One morning, after having the aquarium upstairs for about a week, I sat down to eat breakfast and happened to glance at the tank. There were only two fish. I rubbed my eyes and counted again. Two fish. I called for Rob and made him count them. Still only two. We looked all over the tank for a dead fish, but couldn't find one. Rob immediately blamed Bridget, but to this day I maintain that she is innocent. We had the tank on a stand, and because she couldn't see the fish at eye level she had never exhibited more than a mild curiosity about them. And these fish were fucking boring, even for fish. They rarely moved - mostly they just sat there, suspended in the water. Honestly, they seemed rather sad. Bridget was way too busy batting at bugs on the other side of the windows to pay much attention to depressed motionless fish.

Also, the aquarium had a cover, although there was a two-inch opening at the back along the entire length of the tank. But, first of all, the stand was unsturdy and had Bridget leapt onto the top of the tank I feel quite certain she would have toppled it. And secondly, she's not exactly a huntress. She cannot kill a mouse when it is presented to her, injured, on a silver platter. There is no fucking way she has the skill or reflexes to grab a fish out of water, especially with only a two-inch wide space to work with.

I thought that surely the fish was just hiding somewhere, but when I came home from work and checked the tank, there was still no fucking third fish.

The next morning I checked the tank again. And this time there was one fish. One fish! We emptied the entire aquarium, removed the ceramic bridge and the plastic seaweed plants and the mermaid figurine. We sifted the gravel and disassembled the filter. But, no fish corpses to be found.

Since it seemed practically impossible to me that Bridget could be responsible for this, I drew the next logical conclusion: someone was playing a joke on us. Someone with a key to our house. So I called my brother, who was in high school at the time, living with my parents here in Redneck Valley.

"Hi. So um, I have a weird question."

"Okay."

"Have you...like, are you stealing our fish?"

"Huh?"

"Because if you are, it's fine. I mean, it's pretty funny actually. Every morning we come downstairs and BAM! another fish is gone. It's a brilliant prank, really. But I just need to know that it's you because honestly it's starting to freak me out a little bit."

"Let me get this straight. You think I'm sneaking into your house in the middle of the night and taking your fish?"

"Are you saying you're not?"

"No, I'm not taking your fish."

"I don't believe you."

"Okay."

"So you are?"

"Of course I'm not!"

"Then who is?!"

"Nobody is. Freak."

The next morning I came downstairs and warily checked the tank. One fish. Still there. He was hovering just above the gravel, looking lonely. The next day, he was still there, in the very same spot. And the next day. And the next. I named him Blue because he seemed so sad. (And, you know, because he was the color blue.) I considered the possibility that Blue had eaten the other fish, but they had lived together for so long that it seemed unlikely.

Blue was so apathetic and inactive that I expected him to die at any moment. He didn't even come up to the top for food; he'd just nibble on any bits that happened to float down next to him. But he somehow continued to live. After a week of his moping around, I contemplated flushing him. (Look people, I didn't want the damn fish in the first place.) Instead I gave him to a co-worker, reassuring her that it was okay if he died because he was miserable anyway. Two days later I asked her how he was adjusting to his new home, and she reported that he was constantly swimming around and that she had never seen a happier fish.

A few weeks later I was sweeping under the hutch in the dining room and something that looked like a leaf slid across the floor among the dustbunnies. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that it was the dried body of a fish. And then I remembered that in college a friend's fish had jumped from its tank and flopped around on the floor while she shrieked and finally mustered the nerve to snatch it by the tail and plop it back into the water. And I thought about how our three fish had seemed depressed and I thought about how Blue was downright jubilant to leave our tank for a new home and I looked at Bridget who was blinking at me ever so innocently and I solved the mystery.

Our fucking fish committed suicide.