Anthony and the Goldfish

     Anthony Mason had a simple life. His one bedroom apartment had one small bathtub, one small kitchen sink, one closet with one shelf with one book and one fish bowl holding one goldfish. Each and every morning he woke up at precisely six thirty AM to the one radio station he ever grew a taste for and get ready to go to the one job he ever had.

     Anthony liked simplicity. It let him know where he would be and when. It let him see his future, because every day was exactly the same. When asked what his plans were on such and such a day, he knew. Anthony liked to think to himself that if anything horrible happened and for some odd reason he was accused and had to recall where he was at such and such a date, he would be able to recall with vivid detail because he always was where he always was.

     Each day passed with little consequence. He didn’t watch television or read any books. In his free time he played solitaire with real cards, and most of the time he won. At work he kept to himself. He got all of his work in on time and in the right order. His inbox and outbox seemed perfectly balanced, because his pace never changed and the job never seemed to change either. Anthony liked that his job never changed, because it meant that he never had to learn anything new. No stress. No headache. Just a balance of inbox and outbox.

     However on this particular day, that balance seemed a bit off. That morning, when getting ready for his day, he tripped over the one chair in his apartment that he had forgotten to push in under his one table the night before. It was something that he had never forgotten to do. His morning was run almost by muscle memory, it seemed, and the slightest change effected his trajectory. Anthony was shaken, and while feeding his goldfish before heading to the office he shook out too much food into the bowl. He burnt the one egg he made for himself and he dropped his one slice of toast butter-side down on the floor.

     At work he tried desperately to get back into his usual state of mind, but he couldn’t. The inbox became slightly higher than his outbox and before long he couldn’t take it. Anthony went to his boss’s office and asked for the rest of the day off. He explained that he wasn’t feeling well. Anthony’s boss obliged, half surprised that Anthony had left his desk other than for lunch, and half surprised that the man had, for the first time in the many years that he had worked there, seemed to be out of sorts.

     Anthony quickly drove home, distraught that he could not precisely predict the traffic conditions at that odd time of day. He wondered what he was doing, heading home early. And for what? Burnt eggs? A slight trip? No. It had to be something else. He never forgot to push that chair in. Something was very wrong, he thought.

     When Anthony got to his simple home, with its one table and one chair and one closet with one shelf with one book and one fish bowl with one goldfish, he realized that the one goldfish was floating upside down. When Anthony realized that the goldfish was dead from eating too much. That it was dead from the mistake he made earlier, his distress tripled.

     Anthony rushed from his home to the pet store in order to buy a new goldfish. That empty goldfish bowl would ruin the order of his home. Every day he would wake up and look at it and re-enter this unbreakable funk that he found himself in. Anthony got to the pet store, laid the dollar and a half it cost for the little fish on the counter and demanded a goldfish. He was brought a fish, vibrant and gold, in a little plastic bag of water. Anthony ran to his car, fish in hand, and sped off towards home.

     For the first time, Anthony was weaving through traffic, unable to bear his current state, no, his very location and the very time of day he was located there. It was so out of the ordinary. Anthony noticed that the radio dial had somehow been bumped and was playing something completely foreign to him. He fiddled with it vehemently and swerved around the road. Before he could get the radio station in tune, the goldfish and its bag slid off the passenger seat and onto the floor. Anthony, furious with the clumsy nature of the day and with no regard for where he was going or, in all reality, what he was operating, reached for the bag on the floor of the passenger seat. As he leaned to grab the bag, his other hand turned the steering column without Anthony’s knowledge.

     Anthony seized the goldfish and its bag.

     He heard the screeching of rubber and the honking of a horn.

     Anthony erected himself, bag in hand and saw the last sight of his simple life. One semi-truck grill crashed headlong into Anthony’s one car. When they pulled the car out from under the eighteen wheeled behemoth, the top half of Anthony Mason was gone. His right arm was laid free on the passenger seat, and his right hand still gripped the plastic bag holding a goldfish, still swimming in its tiny plastic sea.

-Eric T. Behr