BLIP AND BLOP – isolation

Blop the goldfish looked longingly at his darling Blip, as she swam round in her bowl, tidying scraps and cleaning the inside of the glass. Somehow, being able to see her and wave a fin at her from time to time made it worse.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like his bowl; it was quite large and comfortable and the water was both the right temperature and nice and clean. He had enough food. But she wasn’t there and he wanted her to be there. Or for him to be in her bowl. That would work too.

Things had been fine in the big fish tank; he would swim over to her end and they would cuddle together behind an outcrop of plastic seaweed. Life had deteriorated sharply when a new arrival was found to be infected with white spot disease or Ich, and it had started to spread to others. Blip and Blop had been moved to separate tanks to keep them safe from the Ich infecton.

It all made perfect sense, but he missed her so much.

A couple of times a day, the two fish would pause, motionless, and look at each other, gazing through the water, the two layers of glass and the 6 inches of air that separated them, their longing to be together crackling between the bowls like an electric charge. Eventually, disconsolate in their separation, they would go back to swimming around, looking for anything left over from their last feed, exactly as goldfish are inclined to do.

It was the relentlessness that got to Blop; the day-after-day-after-day of it all. Moving toward the bottom of the bowl, he sighed a long, goldfish sigh and slipped into a disgruntled torpor.

He woke with a start, swimming round and round his bowl in excitement. In a dream, he had seen himself soaring, salmon like, from one bowl to the other, splashing down close to Blip and clasping her fin as if he would never let go.

“I can do it!” he told himself “I just need to get some speed up and drive myself to the surface and into the air!”

As Blip watched, bemused then alarmed, as he swam round and round the base of the bowl, each lap faster than the last, until, fishy lungs bursting, he powered towards the surface.

Time slowed.

He felt the exact moment he became free of the water and sensed the unfamiliar air on his scales. A sense of ecstatic release suffused him, and his body twisted in the air so he could see Blip as he flew, still in slow motion, towards her. Joy filled him at the thought of them being together.

Blop woke, blinking and disorientated, still near the floor of his bowl, still alone. A flake of food drifted near to him and he ate it, trying to understand what had happened. The answer, sadly, was nothing. He was still in his bowl, Blip still in hers.

Sighing a long, goldfish sigh, he ate another flake of food.

 

The selection of two goldfish in separate bowls as a metaphor for my current predicament in this 500 word flashfic story is not as random as it might seem. I chose this image for the glass splashback in my kitchen and found myself looking at it wistfully at the weekend, wishing I could indeed jump from my bowl to hers!