Suicidal Neons

As a trip to any doctor's office will prove, a fish aquarium is a lovely and uplifting piece of room decor. Kids love to get right up to the glass and look at the fish, while the adults can serenely sit back and enjoy the fish from afar. Which is why I and my sisters wanted to recreate this idyllic scenario at our own house. We already had an aquarium - we weren't messing around with a bowl- we were going straight for the big time. After having scrubbed it and filled it with random stones, pieces of wood, and fake plants, it was time for a trip to the pet store for some fish.

The end product was a UN of fish aquariums. There were guppies, goldfish, neons (my favorite), and all sorts of other types of fish. They coexisted peacefully. It was beautiful. It was like San Francisco.

Then, in one fateful morning, all hell broke loose. At first, I noticed that one of the goldfish had given birth. My dad was the first to spot the miniscule creatures swimming about. After he called us over, we saw that same goldfish eat its young. That's not a good sign. Other fish were trying to get in the action by this point, and all I could do on the outside was scream and yell. Now, it was at this exact point that I noticed other fish were starting to get what I would describe as "woozy." Turns out that what they had was a terminal fish disease called ick. Ick is like AIDS to fish. Once you get it, there's no surviving. Guppies were swimming sideways, our fantail stopped using its tail - it was a pandemic. The ick was spreading, and spreading fast. The neons decided they would rather take their chances on the outside, and multiple neons actually swam to the surface and jumped out of the tank. I remember running around and gathering up the suicidal neons and dropping them back in the water. That water may be contaminated with ick, I thought, but I knew that those fish needed water. That's the one thing I know. Well, in the end, the neons got it too, and in the final analysis, every single fish had been wiped out. About 20 of them, in all, I reckon. What started out as a joyous morning, with the celebration of new life, ended up being the worst fish disaster in Cole household history. We were flushing the toilet like crazy that day.