cou[rage] for the r[love]ution

I work in a pet store. Its a good pet store where we sell nice food and brightly coloured toys and all of our dogs and cats come from the SPCA. We have a few birds in cages, which feels strange and wrong, but we let them out every day and feed them fruit as they chirp happily on our shoulders. We keep a few mice and a few rats but they usually end up going home to someone with a hungry snake.

I am not the world’s most driven retail worker. I spend a lot of time looking at the fish. We have goldfish of all sizes, neons, angelfish, plecos, gouramis. We even have a salt water tank with beautiful coral and clownfish. Each tank is its own ecosystem, a carefully maintained balance of biology designed to sustain pelagic life. Day after day, the creatures in the tank swim around and around, fighting over food and occasionally over the contents of a fallen comrade’s stomach.  Swimming, floating, lazily gazing back at me with bulging eyes that tell me nothing. What must they think of me, if anything at all? Are they aware of the aquatic prison that keeps them alive?

Some days I fantasize about capturing all of the fish and driving them to the sea. We would sit on the beach, staring at the waves. I would be surrounded by dozens of bags half-full with water, the occupants of which gulp and gaze longingly at the tides. We’d finally have some common ground to come together on, the fish and I. All of us would sit in the sand, contemplating the sea, wishing we would never have to leave.

I never really considered what might happen after this fantasy situation, but I imagine I would be forced to gather up the bags, give them away to local folk with aquariums and drive back to Montreal knowing that I would probably have to find a new job after pulling that sort of heist.