Bunny is twenty-five today. She spends her birthday the same way she has spent the past few weeks. She wakes on the cool tile of the fish room bathed in blue fluorescent light emanating from the tanks, with the soft hum of the generator. She douses her face in the still water from the basin. The cuts on her hands and knees have faded to soft purple scars. Good.
There is a new shipment today of the masked Angelfish which Bunny moves swiftly to unpackage. She holds her breath. Mouse had dealt strictly with illegal sellers that were a hit or miss. When they were unlucky they’d end up with a box of glassy eyed dead fish, buoyed up to the top of the water in the bag. Mouse’s flinty coal eyes would glint black and impenetrable.
Cheap prices when it came to exotic fish were never truly cheap. Once they spent a fortune on a single golden Arowana fish and when it arrived, its scales had already dulled and began to slough off. It died within the night. Mouse had Bunny on shift all night changing the water in thirty minute intervals, acclimating the fish slowly. It hadn’t worked.
The Arowana released a sickly sweet stench that clung to Bunny’s hair for the next two months. When it died Mouse had broken the tank in rage. The sooty red water that Bunny had concocted to make sure the Arowana received its nutrients broke through the shattered glass like a dam. It resembled something not unlike blood. Mouse had left the fish room and Bunny watched the golden Arowana lie deflated on the tiles. Bunny could have swore she saw its tail twitch. As if moving involuntarily, Bunny cradled the 2 foot Arowana to her chest. It left a damp stain in the center of her shirt.
Now Bunny lifts off the top of the insulating lid and does a head count. 9 fish total. 6 alive. 3 dead. She exhales slowly. She moves them to the medium tank with a glass partition down the middle. Males on one side. Females on the other. Separating the fish, so that they are in full view of one another yet unable to come into contact, increases the desire to breed, Bunny understands.
Bunny is hopeful for the new cycle. She'll sell the mature fish and begin anew with the new batch of babies. In the blue light of the fish room hidden beneath Mouse’s house she looks forward to her own rebirth. Her skin will finally be clean and luminous. Only then, will she be able to leave the dark embrace of the room and all its little beings.
***
Later at night Bunny lays flat, arms loosely strewn by her sides, back pressed firmly to the cool steeliness of the tiles beneath her. She finds it hard to sleep nowadays so she imagines the coolness of the tiles spreading little ripples into every part of her body: the pinching space between her forehead, her tummy, the fleshiness of her thighs. Bunny likes the way sleep leaves her mind like a smooth and blank canvas. She makes it a point to get in eight hours, even now. But tonight, the sound is back again. Bunny hears bells, the breaking and crunching of glass beneath a pair of boots like a shrill and incessant twinkle. Hot flashes sear her skin.
Zing! Zing! Zing!
Bunny grits her jaw; she should have moved past this by now. She decides the sound has to be coming from outside the fish room, outside Mouse’s basement. Maybe someone is coming for his things. But why now? And the sound is far closer. Bunny can feel it like a glass bottle shattering over her skull. She rushes to the angelfish tank—something is off. One of the fish from the new shipment today, the smallest fish, is trembling. Not trembling but shaking violently. It’s like the fish is being batted around like a punching bag by phantom currents in the tank. Bunny blinks and looks again and now all the angelfish are limp masses flailing around in the water. She can see a big silver bell suspended in the water. She needs to get to it to stop the sound. She lifts off the lid and flings it across the room. She swears it hits one of the tanks behind her. Bunny can hear glass breaking and the hissing of water pushing through the splintered glass. What would Mouse say?
But Mouse is gone and Bunny plunges her head into the tank. The water is cold but not in the same soft and numbing way the tiles are. She can feel the brush of water against her face. It is strangely slick and slimy. Her hair fans out and floats away from her face in the water. She grasps around in the tank, trying to close her fingers around the handle of the silver bell. She tries to move slowly and deliberately; she doesn’t want to scare the fish. But she sees the water begin to swirl and drain from the tank. The water pulls her deeper still and Bunny begins to see the blue-black outlines of shapes and images forming. The shrill call of the bell quickening. Ammonia in her nostrils. Bunny sees the first time she met Mouse or no, the first time Mouse enlisted her on a job.
***
Bunny is embarrassed to know all the regulars at The Chinese Tiger Kitchen. She’s been waiting tables there for eight months now. She’s grown oddly fond of the place. It’s one of those Chinese takeout restaurants that her mother would wince at. The meat and vegetables here were slathered with greasy combinations of oyster sauce and chili oil, masking the sourness of stale ingredients. Bunny and the other waitresses help each other squeeze into too-short Qi Paos before each shift. She lays down the themed Chinese Zodiac menus, smoothing out the creases. On the back page, a hideous green and red dragon superimposed with an English captioned Zodiac chart. The restaurant is corny like that.
Today there is only one guest left at 8:00 pm. A pudgy white man somewhere in his fifties. He’s been coming to Chinese Tiger Kitchen regularly for the last 3 months. He does Tuesdays and Fridays usually. Unlike the other regulars, he changes his order each time. Bunny wonders if he is adventurous or if he simply hasn’t found anything he likes from the menu. She goes to refill his cold water and he looks unusually perturbed. His thumbs swivel around on the keyboard of his phone, typing rapidly. Probably some work related emergency, Bunny thinks. Maybe an angry wife if she’s stretching.
“How are you finding the food, sir?” she puts on her waitress voice, smooth and accommodating. She adds a smile and flashes her teeth. The man still looks disturbed. He looks up at her slowly, surveying.
“Hey, kid,” he lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Do you wanna make some money?” Bunny tries to stifle a laugh, pressing her lips in neutral lines. He hadn’t struck her as the creepy type. She decides to indulge him; she plays innocent.
“Sir, is everything alright?” She matches his concerned look.
“No, no,” he flails his arms widely gesturing and then pins back down to his sides, self consciously. “I need you to help me. And listen, it’s quite the easy job really. I just need you to drop by Petsmart—it's like 20 minutes away—and buy a forty gallon tank, a water filter, pump… Here, I’ll write it down; there’s quite a bit.” He starts scribbling frantically on the back of his paper napkin with a pen he’s taken from her apron pocket. Bunny is intrigued now. She wonders why the man is starting some sort of massive fish colony at 8:00pm on a Tuesday.
“Look, okay I know how strange this all sounds,” the man says, sensing her puzzlement, “But I wouldn’t be asking you for help unless it was absolutely necessary. He stretches his mouth around the word absolutely. “The thing is the order of fish came in early. Like real early. Like a month.” His speech speeds up and the words crash into each other. “Like if I don’t get this set up in the next two hours it’s all over. Do you know how much money I spent on these goddamn fish?” He is snarling now and he tries to calm himself. He pats his knees like a child. “Nevermind,” he sighs, “you don’t need to know the backstory. But if you get the supplies by 10:00, I’ll get you $500 on top of the costs.”
“Whatever,” he laughs, “Let’s make that $1,000.”
Bunny’s eyes gleam at the mention of money. Her roommate Lottie had been bugging her for the past weeks about missing her portion of rent. It wasn’t the first time. No matter how many shifts Bunny took at The Chinese Tiger Kitchen, money always ran short. As a 21 year old college dropout with little direction in her life beyond waiting tables, prospects of well-paying employment were slim.
“Okay,” Bunny says, “I’ll do it. But I want all the money now.” The man has to be desperate because he fishes out a palmful of wadded up hundred dollar bills and hands it to her, hardly counting the sum. Loose coins clink in his pockets as he moves.
“That should be enough,” his face brightens and he grins widely. “Glad we’re in this together.” He shakes her hand, pumping it up and down vigorously. He says, “Call me Mouse.”
“I’m Bunny.”
Bunny clocks off her shift early that night and rushes to the Pet Store. She delivers three bags full of fish related equipment to Remington Drive, the address scrawled on the paper napkin. She rings the doorbell and drives off without waiting around.
Bunny begins to see the man—no, Mouse—around a lot more. He thanks her for the Petsmart dash, and says it saved him tens of thousands of dollars.
Then, there are more fish and more jobs. They forge a partnership of sorts over the course of years. Bunny remembers the first time Mouse showed her the fish room in the basement. She had stood transfixed at the doorway. There was an ethereal element to the room. It was as if time stood very still and held its breath. If Bunny closed her eyes she could imagine she was underwater too, subject only to currents and the force of nature.
Can you believe no one knows about this, Mouse had said laughing, not even my family or friends. Bunny laughed along but knew it to be an admission of aloneness—one that she was all too familiar with.
***
Again, there is the water swirling and the images of her and Mouse dissipating. Bunny grasps at the images but to no avail. Light bleeds into dark. The water dances in circles and Bunny feels very cold. Her eyes focus and in the water takes form again. It reveals Mouse’s dying body.
***
There was Mouse lying in the shattered glass. Just like the Golden Arowana from before. Bunny had unlocked the basement and fish room to begin her Tuesday rounds, only to find Mouse—Mouse but not Mouse. Mouse but dying. Bunny thinks she screams but she cannot be sure. Mouse’s body is so mangled and crimson and cut up from the glass of the tank. She pushes away the wet glass trying to uncover some semblance of Mouse and the glass carves small ribbons of crimson blood into her hands and knees.
Zing! Zing! Zing!
Zing! Zing! Zing!
Then there are the sirens of the ambulance and Bunny clasps her hands over her ears. There is Mouse on a stretcher being carted away. Cardiac arrest, she learns later. There was nothing you could have done. He was already dead, sweetheart.
Bunny slips away from the hospital as soon as Mouse’s ex-wife and children arrive. I want what you once had, she longs to tell them. I thought I had what you did. She doesn’t attend Mouse’s funeral. What Bunny does instead is return to the fish room and rebuild its dark sanctuary. She replaces the tank Mouse broke when he collapsed and purchases new fish. They will grow. Bunny decides she will make everything right again. She will forge a new beginning.
***
Bunny emerges from the water coughing and spluttering, pulling her face out of the water in one swift motion. The swirling of the water has stopped. No silver bell. Bunny dries her face with the sleeve of her shirt before falling into a dark and dreamless sleep.
In the morning, she wakes to the fish room as it has always existed. There are no signs of broken tanks or shattered glass. The angelfish swim in languid paths. Everything is still, holding its breath. Everything is alright.
Assured by this knowledge, Bunny ascends the steps leading out of the fish room basement. She pulls the latch of the door and white light catches her fall.
Bunny.
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