INVISIBLE FISH

Short Story by J. Eric Miller

The Owner knows something is wrong in his mall pet store. It seemed a good idea three years ago: puppies, kittens, exotic birds, reptiles, and fish. And he thinks he remembers good times, good business, a general feeling of happiness in the store. Each morning now, though, he finds the place is haunted, the employees jittery, he himself completely on edge, baffled, afraid. The customers sense it too and stay away. The puppies and kittens are not purchased, grow up in the plastic cages, and he has to ship them to pounds and experimenters.

Almost every morning, too, he finds something has died or been injured.

The chimpanzee grows more sullen by the day. They’ve turned his cage to face away from the doorway because he winces at the approach of pet store visitors. They’ve hung a full-sized poster of a different, smiling chimp so that people will know he is there.

Sometimes, looking in at the beast, the Owner wonders if he ought to just shoot it. He thinks absurd thoughts: he ought to come in here and shoot every living thing and be done with it. But he doesn’t have a gun. Or the guts. His manager, a younger man named Reggie, is equally frustrated but more rational. “Something’s going on here,” he tells the Owner. “We should try to get a hold of it.”

The Owner agrees, but neither of them has a plan to turn the business around. The Owner slips into memories which present the pet store as a place of joy. When he framed and hung the first dollar spent there. He used to spend his afternoons in the aquarium room. Fishes of all size, all color. Green fingernail slivers, darting, Sluggish, silver and gold fists. Forward. Blink. Back. Forward. Around. Pause. The water still and heavy. Don’t tap the glass—for them it’s equivalent to a gunshot being fired in your ear. In tall, thin cylinders, Japanese fighting fish; teenage boys sometimes moved them one beside the other to see the fish lunge at each other and hit the glass and lunge again and hit the glass and finally learn and then sit staring with uncertainty.

Long ago, he created the joke which still stands: an aquarium with blue pebbles, plastic sea-leaves, water, and a filtration system. No fish, but colorless bubbles rising against the florescent, pinkish light. He’d hung a sign: Invisible Fish—a rare form from Brazil. He used to like to watch people stand there, looking to see what cannot be seen. Peering. Leaning forward. Squinting. Sometimes, even tapping—lightly, like a cap gun. Standing up, frowning.

Is this a joke? And at least a few times a day, somebody would see a fish. The flash of a tail. The ridge of a back. Made visible in the odd combination of light and stone and bubble.

The pet store had been magical then, had been clean, had been promising. Or so he believes. But nobody stops anymore to see the invisible fish. Everything has gone sour.

The chimp knows the secret.

At night, the mall security guard tortures the pet store animals. He raises the steel curtain an hour or two before going in, so that parakeets will have by necessity given up on their panicked vigilance and gone back to sleep. Then he can creep in and knock them from their perches, watch them thump to the floor, scramble up in surprise, and look around stupidly, slowly blinking big black, eyes, as if waking from the dream of a pet store to the reality of a jungle where they are prey.

But it has gone far beyond that. Now, the security guard brings with him things from home: matches, rubber bands, a paring knife, darts. The chimp stays up at night, peering through screw holes in the back of his cage, seeing in collage the guard with the animals.

And in the morning, the Owner asks himself, why have the two rats turned on this one, poking out his eyes? Where have the iguana’s back feet gone? Why would the rabbit drown in such a shallow dish? How is it that the ferret’s asshole has turned to blood? The guard watches a turtle spin slowly in the break room microwave . . .

The Owner asks the morning employee if there weren’t ten hamsters instead of nine . . .

The chimp knows that eventually the guard will come to hurt him. Occasionally, he tests his level of pain, pinching his arm, squeezing his testicles, but he cannot take very much. He rolls on the floor of his cage, trying to make himself small, covering his head with his arm. And the guard flits through the room, suddenly swinging his baton into the parrot who has been teetering from side to side repeating, Uh-ohh, uh-ohh, uh-ohhh …

The Owner dreams. He sees an ark, a steady progression of animals from the forest. This is a good dream. But no, the trees are dead, the forest reeks visibly. And the sun is hot and it will never rain in this dream. And inside his ark, the animals begin to scream.

The chimp suffers his fear. The Owner and the employees have stopped touching him. They change the papers beneath his cage. They drop in food and pour in water. He remembers with longing and fear their touch. Are they good people or bad people?

The guard is working his way back, night by night. Burning, maiming, killing. Blood and death. He does not know there is a chimp. He has not yet hurt a fish. This night he finds himself peering into the invisible fish aquarium. Where are they? Where are you?

He uses his flashlight, not sure he sees anything. He rolls up his sleeve and sticks his hand in the water.

The chimp hides his head.

The guard searches: hand darting this way and that, fingers curling and uncurling, banging the glass. But he finds nothing. He searches and searches, but never gets his fingers around anything that feels like a fish.

They must be quick, wary . . .

Frustration grows in him like pain. He grabs the aquarium at its edges and pulls it from it shelf and drops it to the floor, where it shatters. The guard believes he can see flashes of the little fish as the water spreads thin and they suffocate. “That’ll take care of you,” he says.

Then he turns and sees the frightened chimp, so unexpected and so unlike anything in the pet store that the guard pokes his finger through the cage bars out of genuine curiosity. “Hey,” he says.

The chimp then does something he never imagined himself doing. He bites, quickly and hard.

“Goddamn,” the guard says, pulling his hand away. “I’ll get you later.”

In the morning, Reggie the manager has figured it out. He tells the Owner, “The damn chimp has been getting out. How else would the aquarium get pulled down? Look, if he bends his fingers through there, he would maybe be able to pry open the cage. The little bastard.”

It all dawns on the Owner: the chimp has been hurting the animals, for a full month now, has been leaving the odor of torture in the pet store, has ruined business and the goodness that once was. “That evil son of a bitch,” the Owner says, gritting his teeth in anger and surprise and pain.

They go to the store room and make a plan.

“We’ll kill him.”

“But how? I don’t have a gun. Do you have a gun?”

“No,” Reggie says. “But I know: we’ll wait till after closing. We’ll bring him back here. You’ve got something hard to hit him with? A tire iron?”

“Yeah,” the Owner says. “Of course, in my car.”

“Bring it in. We’ll kill him.”

The Owner thinks for a moment. Then he says, “He deserves it.”

The chimp is glad for the touch of these men, though it also makes him nervous. He’s never seen these two hurt the animals much, only in moments of impatience. He’s never seen them with the guard. Perhaps they will take him where the guard cannot get him. Even as he tries to imagine them into saviors he knows it cannot be so.

They put a cloth wrap around the whole of his head so that he cannot open his mouth very wide. Reggie lifts him out with leather gloves.

He wraps his arms around Reggie’s neck, though it is only because he cannot think of what else to do.

“Careful,” the Owner says. The face of the chimp is ugly and evil to him. “Don’t look at me like that, you little son of a bitch.”

The chimp makes a small sound, uncertain of what he wants it to mean or what it does.

“Shut up,” the Owner tells him.

In the storeroom, the men set the chimp on a steel table. He sinks back to his haunches and looks up at them. They lift up their tire irons.

“Should we just start hitting him?” the Owner asks, feeling a loss of sensation in his guts.

“That’s what we got to do.”

The chimp looks from face to face. He looks at the heavy metal objects in their hands, and he understands. He puts his elbows over his head and hunkers down. They strike blindly at first, breaking his arms, his ribs. He falls from the table and tries to scramble to standing. His leg is shattered. His head splits open, his brains spill out, and he thinks nothing more.

Reggie takes him into the woods and buries him.

The Owner dreams his terrible dreams, the ark in a desert, the corpses of animals rotting everywhere, those that are still living trying to rise.

The guard does not properly clean the bite mark on his finger. Nor does he visit a health care professional. By the time a week has passed, his hand is pus-swollen and stinks. The bite marks turn green and the skin begins to peel away, so that he can see his bones. He takes to his bed and dreams fever dreams. His arm grows thick with poison and his hand dies, curling up. He wakes sometimes to the feel of the flesh along his arm and shoulder cracking open. When he tries to jerk away from the stench and the pain he finds he cannot move. He wishes for water and saviors but he knows that none will come.

§ § §

J Eric Miller is an assistant professor of English at Kennesaw State University. He recently spent two years teaching creative writing at the American University of Beirut and has written a novel set there. His fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines, and he has recently sold his collection of short stories, Animal Rights and Pornography, to Soft Skull Press who will publish them June 2004.

This piece was first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

It was nominated for the 2004 Pushcart Prize.

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