The End of an Era

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My last fish is dying. I wrote him a haiku:

The last fish is sick
Limp, it drifts, waiting for death.
I'm like a vulture.

I feel guilty, watching and waiting for him to finally die. I've enjoyed having fish. When we first got them, about six or seven years ago, I loved sitting and watching them swim around. It was relaxing. The first night we had fish, the molly started popping out babies and it was an adventure counting how many we had, when the number increased daily, and then decreased daily as the small fry were either eaten by bigger fish or caught in the filter. Only one of the babies survived to adulthood. Over the years we had many kinds of fish. Besides mollys, we had neon tetras, zebra danios, plecostumus, a shark, snails, and even a frog, as well as other types of tropical fish I don't remember the names of. But now it is the end of an era. About a year ago, when the four cats settled in and started stalking the tank, I stopped replacing fish when they died, and the numbers started to decrease. Finally, a couple months ago, we were down to one - a bright pink fish named Lava. He was a schooling fish, but his school, and everyone else had passed on. He endured a lot longer than I thought he would, but yesterday he was settled on the bottom of the tank, unmoving. I thought he was dead, but when I came back later to scoop him out, he had moved and was slowly drifting behind a rock, weakly swaying his fins. I fed him, but I don't know how much food he got, since he couldn't swim up to the top of the tank for it. Last night, he was still moving, sluggishly. Poor guy. This morning, I think he is dead... he is at the opposite end of the tank from where he was last night, but he is lying on his side now, and I don't see his fins moving. Maybe now I can take down the aquarium and clean out behind the dresser it has sat on for the last several years, too heavy to move. Now we can paint the wall behind it.

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