Goldfish

by Rohan Fitzpatrick

When I was nine I did something bad.

It happened during the summer holidays, when I had nothing to do and neither did my neighbour, Bert, a lovely old man with a heart of gold. He would sit around in his back garden with the same tattered Steinbeck novel, and I knew he didn’t read it because I watched him from my window while I practised enchanting rat skulls, a naturally tedious process. My goldfish had just died, so I found myself latching onto the second most interesting thing that I could stare at through a pane of glass: Bert.

Bert was fascinating because he moved very little and yet he looked so energetic, like he was just dying to get up and do something. It bothered me, to the point where I couldn’t sit and look at him without feeling frustrated. So I did the one thing I couldn’t do when my goldfish stopped moving. I went and asked him.

“Why don’t you move?” I said, startling him from behind his wheelie bin. “Are you broken?”

Bert looked taken aback, but he understood soon enough and humoured me with a response fit for a child.

“My days of mobility are about over,” he said, closing his book and gazing at me through the bottom halves of his glasses. “I’m too old to do much more than reading.”

“But you don’t read, do you?” I said, and we both smiled.

Bert told me that he didn’t read much because he was easily distracted by his own thoughts. Every word was a landmine, ready to blow him right back to his childhood in Cornwall.

“I used to leap from the cliffs on sunny days.” Bert said, nostalgia twinkling in his eyes. “Didn’t have time for reading. I was too busy having the time of my life.”

Bert’s words troubled me, and that night I found myself lying awake with them buzzing about my head. It made me sad most of all, but a part of me felt curious. What if Bert could go back?

I knew it was impossible, even for an up-and-coming warlock such as myself, but then I started thinking about what Bert would do if he were back in Cornwall now. Even if he was too old to dive from the clifftops, it didn’t mean he couldn’t sit back with his book and enjoy the tranquillity of the ocean. Maybe those mental landmines wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe he just wouldn’t care!

That was when I noticed the empty tank in the corner, dark and lonely since we flushed my goldfish down to subaquatic heaven. Ideas began to blossom, and soon enough I found myself gazing through the glass once again, just wondering…

Like I mentioned before, I was an aspiring warlock and only really beginning to learn the trade. I could make frogs laugh, turn pigeons inside out – the basics – but I didn’t know the repercussions of performing experiments on human subjects. Nowadays I’d probablyknow better. Back then I was inexperienced… and naïve.

The next day I went out and told Bert my idea. He listened and, as you might expect, didn’t believe me. He humoured me, said I’d make a fantastic little wizard, then gave me a pat on the head and asked if I’d like a cookie.

He really did have a heart of gold.

Munching on said cookie, I told him I could prove it.

Ten minutes later I dragged out the fish tank, filled with water and fully decorated. There was a little boat inside, an island with palm trees, and I even built him a Lego shelter in case he got cold. It was, I thought at the time, the perfect little getaway for a lonely old man.

“It can be a new life for you,” I said. “You can be young again.”

“I can indeed,” he laughed jovially.

Then I pointed a glittery teasel at him and turned him into a man no bigger than a jellybean.

To say Bert enjoyed the tank would be an understatement. He loved it. I sat and watched him bobbing around in his boat for hours. Always laughing, constantly thanking me. One of the last things he ever told me was that he felt young again, and he did it just before leaping from that tiny boat and cannonballing into the water.

I’m afraid this is where things get bad.

Bert remained in the tank for the better part of a week, until my parents noticed me staring for hours at what they thought was an empty tank. How could they have known? They hadn’t the slightest idea that I was a practising warlock. Why? Well, they never asked.

So, being the sort of people who were always willing to ‘try’with their estranged daughter, they decided to surprise me. I came home from visiting a friend one afternoon to see them both grinning.

“You might want to check your room,” my father said. “I think you have a lodger.”

Thinking they had seen Bert I scarpered up the stairs, but when I pushed open my bedroom door my whole body went numb and I stopped thinking altogether.

“We saw how empty it looked,” my mother said from behind me. “And it broke our hearts to see you’d filled it with water again…”

There was a fish in my tank.

It was one of those bullish ones, huge and black with a large protruding skull. It bobbed around, came up for air, butted its clumsy head against the glass.

I said nothing right away, walked calmly up to the tank and peered inside. It didn’t take long to realise Bert wasn’t there. I imagined a jellybean sized man paddling away from that fish, that monster, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Perhaps he got out, I thought, then noticed the little upturned boat and my stomach hit the carpet.

Like I said, I did something bad when I was nine.

Really bad.

Bio:
Rohan Fitzpatrick is a writer from murky Middle England. He has written four novels, a short-story book and a mess of poems. He has published in a New York magazine, but nothing in England. They like him better in New York, because he doesn’t use words like ‘murky’ there.