Fish Home

By Angelina Franqueiro

The glass was cursed. That was what the twins said the morning Wahala died. They burst into my room, shrieking and bouncing on my bed like it was Christmas Day.

I poked my head out from under the covers. “What’s all this about a curse?” I asked.

The twins and I stood solemnly in the doorway to the master bedroom. Wahala’s tank lay in shards on the floor, his watery home steadily sinking into the carpet. Wahala himself was positioned in the center of the mess, flanked by a flimsy seaweed plant and a toy treasure chest. Glimmering with wet, his plump orange body clashed with his surroundings: dusty light suspended over the empty bed, soggy charcoal carpeting, and pale blue wallpaper, graying like an envelope licked one too many times. The damp, now uncontained, saturated everything in the room. An earthquake with a goldfish for an epicenter.

Tobias, all scrawny limbs and fidgets, flung himself into the crime scene and began to weep. Crouched low, his swollen belly pressed into his thighs, his arms wrapped around his bony knees, he looked exactly as he had the day I first saw him on the staticky screen in my parents’ television room. I was small then; my feet barely touched the floor as I sat on the couch packing my knapsack and munching cornflakes. Offscreen, some slow, heavy finger struck the keys of a piano. Disembodied notes rang out as the camera zoomed in on two small beings huddled beneath a medical tent. They couldn’t have been much older than I was. There was a strange light in their eyes, a glow from within some deep hollow. Dove-white words ran across the bottom of the screen: Help UNICEF today. Call… My mother shut off the television and hurried me out the door before I could read the number that would supposedly stop hunger. When I got home that day, the twins I had seen on the UNICEF commercial were sitting in my room, playing with my toys as if they’d been there all my life.

“Wake up!” Tobias shouted at Wahala’s corpse. “Why won’t you wake up already?”

His equally small counterpart, Nani, stared up at me. The look in her dark eyes was a familiar one: Aren’t you going to do something? I knelt beside Tobias and gently touched his back, but to no avail. Nani sighed and firmly gripped her brother’s shoulders.

“Listen here. Wahala is dead. He’s not waking up, but we can’t just toss him in the trash. He was a good fish, and he deserves more than that,” she said. I winced as she pulled him to his feet. His knees were full of glass, but they didn’t bleed.

“I suppose we could say a few words before we flush him,” I said. Tobias let out a wail, and Nani scowled at me.

“No. We’ll give him a proper funeral, with flowers and a shiny wooden box.”

I sighed and dug around under the bed until I found something they would deem suitable: a small black ring box. There wasn’t a speck of dust on its velvety exterior, but I blew on it all the same. A glint of gold peeked out as I cracked it open, revealing a thin band with a small pearl set in its center.

“Janine?” One of the twins, I wasn’t sure which, called out to me. Four fingers in, my left hand pulsed with a phantom ring. I rose and placed the ring on the bed. Despite having been empty for quite some time, there was a person-shaped depression in its center.

Lifting Wahala by his gossamer tail fin, I placed him where the pearl ring once sat and snapped the lid shut. “Alright everyone. Off to the kitchen,” I said. “We’ll bury him in the flower box on the windowsill.”

The twins, of course, objected to this idea as well and practically fell at my feet as I headed downstairs.

“Wahala’s not a flower!” Nani said. She and Tobias blockaded the kitchen sink, beyond which lay the flower box where nothing seemed to grow. Now it was destined to be a graveyard. I lightly pushed the twins aside with my foot and began to dig. As I nestled Wahala’s small coffin into the indent, they locked hands and glared up at me.

“Wahala needs to go home,” they said in unison. I slapped my palms against the counter and turned sharply.

“Hey! Cut The Shining crap right now. You know that gives me the creeps.”

When I was their age, the three of us camped out in the basement (so my parents wouldn’t hear) and watched the film. After, the twins taunted me by mimicking the doll-like girls from the movie. They joined hands and intoned whatever came to mind; commercial jingles, sweet nothings, knock-knock jokes. What they said didn’t matter. It was how they said it that made me shudder. The same tape we watched back then was here somewhere, mixed in with all the old home videos the twins occasionally ran at night.

Hands unclasped, they looked up at me in earnest. I stopped burying the ring box and—it was then that I realized I was wearing nothing but a shabby pink bra and matching underwear—wiped my hands on my bare stomach.

“Are you going to tell me where you want him buried or not?”

Nani and Tobias exchanged a look, silently electing a representative. “The creek.” Nani stepped forward. “The one where we used to swim every summer.”

I pointedly looked out the window, which framed an abundance of plain, gray clouds, as if the sky had been bleached of color. It certainly was not summer.

“It’s never summer here,” said Nani.

The twins led me down the front path, to the edge of the cul-de-sac. Lifeless but pristine, the neighborhood was like a snow globe left unshaken. All the houses along the desolate streets were empty, as if their owners left for lunch one day and never returned. Inside each home was the footprint of a life deserted: a coffeepot full and steaming in the kitchen, televisions buzzing in empty living rooms, places set at the table, a book lying open on an armchair. Some unknown force maintained the stillness that had crept into my existence overnight; everything in its place, lawns perfectly manicured, the world spinning as if life were being lived behind an invisible curtain. The traffic lights didn’t seem to notice that there were never any cars on the road; they flashed green, yellow, red, and green again without pause.

Things had worked this way for a long time. For years it had just been the twins, until one day Wahala showed up. I came along shortly after that. One day I woke up and it was like a mysterious gloved hand had flipped a switch while I slept. Seamlessly, I shifted from one state of being to another, or perhaps it was everything around me that had changed while I stayed stagnant. That morning, I awoke in the guest—not master—bedroom, brushed my teeth in the small bathroom next door. The air seemed off, as if my stale morning breath had tainted the world around me. Barely any of this registered as odd until I trudged downstairs and found the twins—who I hadn’t seen for thirty-four years—eating toaster waffles at the kitchen table.

“The car’s a bust again,” Nani said as we approached the forest green Subaru parked in the driveway. Hands cupped around my eyes, I peered into the driver’s window. The whole car was packed with clothes: piles upon piles of jeans, dresses, pant suits, sweaters—even a tiny dance costume made of a sparkly elastic material. At least my current outfit now made sense.

Last time we checked the car, it was full of cookware. The twins had gone to great lengths to figure out how to make us food, employing intricate tricks that would have made Caractacus Potts proud. With the car out of commission, we walked to the creek. After five miles of suburban apocalypse and vacant highways, my feet stopped moving. We were halfway through the trek, standing in the middle of a forest trail that had long since seen any hikers. Scarcely any light leaked through the dense tree cover. I could dig right here and get this whole burial thing over with. The ground was soft enough.

Nani read my mind. “No! Janine, we are taking Wahala to the creek.”

“Yeah! We have to send him home!” Tobias piped in.

The two of them tugged on my arms and nipped at my heels until my feet unstuck themselves from the damp earth and started forward.

The creek was exactly as I remembered it: quiet and winding, both banks lined with trees, desolate yet brimming with life. We stood on a long, flat rock and watched the rust-colored water rush past our toes. Bits of silt and sediment rode atop twigs that floated downstream like scraggly boats; to the left, a pair of sapphire dragonflies skimmed the water’s surface. Just downstream, an island covered in prickly purple blooms split the flow in two.

I knelt on the rock, dipping my pinkie finger in the cool water. “Well,” I began, holding out the ring box, “Should we say a few words?”

The twins nodded in unison.

“I’ll start,” said Nani. “Wahala was a dependable fish. Smart, too. I hope he likes the creek as much as we do.”

Tobias stepped forward and placed a tiny finger on the box’s lid. “You were my favorite friend. Besides Janine and Nani.”

The three of us sat—Tobias on my left and Nani on my right—with our ankles dangling in the water, our knees swaying with the pulse of the current.

I cleared my throat. “I hope you find your way home.”

The twins watched in silence as I placed the ring box in the water. Caught in the quickening flow, it spun for a moment, then steadied itself as the water buoyed it along. I took the twins’ hands as the box bobbed out of sight. We stayed perfectly still in its wake, as if the afterimage of Wahala drifting away still glinted on the water’s surface. The air seemed a bit cooler now, and the nape of my neck prickled with goosebumps. I’d adjusted to the temperature of the water.

“Don’t you want to swim?” Nani said.

Tobias raised a chant. “Swim! Swim! Swim!”

I turned to look at them one at a time. Tobias was on his feet now, his arms up high overhead, little fists punching the air. His sister remained seated, stirring up gentle whirlpools with her feet. Even she seemed content.

Slowly, I eased myself into the water. It was still chilly enough to send tiny shock waves coursing through me, puckering up the loose skin around my joints. My limbs stretched out like the five wide legs of a starfish as the water crept beneath me. It tickled my scalp and swept my hair back, gently cradling my neck in its shapeless, sweeping arms. Sky and ground merged, all at once gray-blue and beautiful. The creek flowed with and through me, as if some internal tide had shifted. When I began to drift, I wasn’t alarmed. White specks floated down from the sky, gracefully landing on the water’s surface like fairy parachutes. One dropped into my cupped palm, and I brought it close to my face to examine it. Cottonwood seeds.

Laughter in the distance set off a warning signal somewhere deep in my brain, muffled by layers and layers of cortex. With my head tilted back, the rock I’d been sitting on just moments before was now upside down and steadily shrinking. The twins had almost completely disappeared, but I could still make out their small forms far upstream, splashing in the water with their hands raised to the sky, smiling and catching fistfuls of summer snow.

About the Author

Angelina Franqueiro is a research assistant at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. She has published scientific work in pain psychology. This is her first fiction publication. Find her on Instagram at angelina_rose56 and or X @angelinafranq.