Cicada by J. Eric Laing

Author:J. Eric Laing [Laing, J. Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475211788
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2012-04-18T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

All along the one side of the goldfish a spray of white flecks peppered its otherwise brightly orange and perfect mail. They were the scars of an infection that had nearly killed the fish. Buckshot imagined them to be the reminders of an almost fatal shotgun blast. This fish is a survivor, he told himself. The proprietor of Melby’s House of Exotic Pets, Mrs. Stella Humble, had been foolish enough to give Buckshot a discount on this particular specimen since she considered it flawed. Nothing could have been further from the truth as far as Buckshot was concerned. Vitamin D was perfect.

He’d named the fish in honor of all the milk money he’d saved to purchase it. He’d made the majority of the money from his allowance for chores, but by far it’d been those milks he skipped that’d pained him the most. Oh, how he’d suffered. Almost as much as the gunshot wounded Vitamin D, he supposed. Of course, his greatest financial windfall had been the dollar bill his mother had given him to assuage his grief on the day he’d found Raymond Stout, a memory he was determined to erase. No, that didn’t bother him, he’d argued silently with his fear each night since.

“Weren’t nothin’ but a dead man,” he’d nonchalantly told Casey over the crackle of their campfire nights before.

Dead men and shotgun wounds be damned, all that was behind them; the boy and his pet fish were united at last.

Buckshot fogged the glass of the fishbowl as his hot breath heaved with the excitement of the moment. Inches away, yet in a world all its own, Vitamin D floated languidly, but not at all indifferent to him. As Buckshot peered in close—the tip of his nose moving from side to side—little Vitamin D followed the motion with casual strokes of its gossamer tail and fins.

“Ain’t you a sport model?”

He pinched a few more flakes of food into the bowl. Vitamin D rushed up to take them in. Mrs. Humble had warned that too much food could kill the fish, but Buckshot wondered if maybe she wasn’t just having some fun with him.

“Eatin’ don’t kill nothin’. It’s starvin’ what’ll do ya in.”

He let another pinch of flakes lily pad the surface. At first Vitamin D raced away to the rainbow colored gravel lining the bottom of the bowl, only then to dart back to feed some more. Buckshot was enjoying the fish as much as he could, but he was also discovering that interaction with a pet fish quickly finds its limits. There would be no petting or playing of games. A pet fish is more of a sit and watch deal, Buckshot came to realize. After a few minutes of lip-chewing contemplation he accepted the fact without buyer’s remorse, however. Letting slip another pinch of food, he nodded to himself, satisfied that having a secret fish had its own rewards. Far better rewards.

There were a number of reasons Buckshot had kept his fish a secret, but primarily it was because he didn’t think he’d be allowed a fish in the first place.

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