My finger counts the keys from left to right. I touch the little toilet paper container key and the storage room key and then the square front door key. The keys are on a chord around my neck. The chord itches my skin sometimes but the boss says I’d lose them otherwise and he’s right. The clock shows two minutes until I have to open the bookstore. Several women and their kids are waiting in the parking lot outside. I do my best not to make eye contact.
Mark is leaning against the front counter next to the register, flipping through a magazine. He looks up at me. “One of the fish is dead.”
“One of the fish?”
“Yea. A silver one, a big one. The others are eating him.” He turns the page and then tosses the magazine on the counter.
“Eating him?”
“Yea.”
I imagine a hollow fish corpse bobbing at the surface of the tank, its old companions-turned-barracudas gnawing what is left of its tail and mouthing its remaining eyeball. “Do fish eat each other?”
“Yea.” Mark puts his hand down the back of his shirt, scratches, examines his fingernails, scratches again.
“How long has it been dead?”
Mark holds his hand close to his face, slides his thumbnail back and forth underneath the tip of his middle nail. “I don’t know.” His thumb moves on to the ring nail. It looks like his fingernails are mating.
I want to go look at the dead fish right now but it’s time to unlock the door. The women outside are eyeing me and peering through the glass at the clock on the wall behind the register. It’s fucking Saturday. Two little kids are putting their hands all over the window I just cleaned, smearing cloudy streaks of spit and skin oil. I walk, lean down, twist the key in the lock, smile at the women outside as I hold the door open.
Three middle aged women and one young-middle aged woman walk in. There are two little red haired girls in matching plaid dresses which I think is corny, two small boys walking behind the girls. The young-middle aged woman is pushing a stroller with a fat baby-kid wearing yellow Velcro shoes. There is another boy walking behind them – mop brown hair, hands in his jean pockets. I see him in here a lot; last week he started reading The Giver. He’s wearing a red shirt that says “I put Ketchup on my ketchup”.
“Hey, I like your shirt.”
The kid smiles and his front teeth bulge out of his mouth like they want to get out of there. “Thanks.”
One of the middle-aged women clears her throat. “Excuse me. There isn’t any music on.”
“I haven’t turned it on yet.” I hate Saturdays.
“Well are you going to?”
“Yes. I am going to.” She says okay, turns and keeps moving with the rest of the group towards the kid’s section. I walk to the café in the corner of the room.
“Hey Cathy.” Cathy is wearing an orange dress and her usual goofball smile that I think is wonderful.
“Hey Dennis.” She turns around and plucks a paper cup off the stack and holds it under the coffee spicket, pulls the lever so brown pours into the cup. She sets the cup of coffee in front of me and leans over the counter. I feel my heart beat a little faster.
“You see the dead fish yet?” She lowers her voice like the fish is a scandal. She smells like Chamomile tea.
“Not yet. I’m on my way over there though.”
“You should go see it, before it gets taken out.” Cathy smiles again. Her smile makes me think of cake and mimosas. I see Mark behind the espresso bar in a cloud of steam. He nods.
I walk to the condiment table, dump an inch of coffee into the trash can, pour three seconds of cream and four seconds of white sugar into my cup, fasten on a plastic lid. I tell Cathy and Mark that I’ll see them in a bit.
I go to the back room, kneel in front of my backpack, pour two seconds of Jameson from a metal flask into the cup.
I need to paint more. I haven’t painted anything in weeks. I haven’t finished a painting in months. I stir the coffee with my finger and think that it would be great to paint with liquid pennies, brand new shiny pennies melted and globbed onto the canvas. If there were truly liquid pennies, I'd have something to work with.
I snap the lid back onto the cup, flip the music switch up on my way out of the back room. I walk across the store, around the corner past the photography section and the cooking section. My shoes look like dolphins moving against the carpet. The carpet is multicolored and formed into little nodules. It looks like what you see when you first close your eyes, like Fruity Pebbles and Coco Puffs cereal crumbled together.
The fish tank. I stop, put my fingers on the glass. The tank is a rectangle, two and a half feet wide and about six feet long. I imagine someone on the other side of the tank, looking through the water at my fingers pressed flat against the glass, the circle ridges red and obvious. The young middle-aged mother walks over to me. I see the kids' section behind her and about seven moms sitting there. There are kids rolling on the carpet and pulling books off the shelves. There are kids eating muffins and scones and getting crumbs all over the place, stepping on the pieces of pastry and smashing them into the carpet. Most of the mothers are talking and laughing. The woman is right next to me now. She has huge round eyes, dark angry eyes, outlined in brown makeup.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes? Can I help you find something?”
“No. There is a dead fish in that tank.”
“Yes.” I take a sip of my coffee. I sip it carefully. It is hot but not hot enough to burn my lips. I turn my head to look at the tank. The fish must be on the other side behind the plants.
The woman’s voice gets louder, heavier. “Are you going to take it out?”
“I have to call the fish guys. They take care of the tank.”
“Well it is scaring the children. You’ve got to have it removed right away. It’s horrible.”
“Alright, I am going to get it taken care of right now.” I move away before looking for the fish. I sip my coffee, walk away from the tank and the mother, walk past the cooking and the photography sections. I see a man walking towards the front counter so I go over there. I stand at the register and sip my coffee. The man’s hands are very large and there is a lot of black wiry hair on his knuckles. I wonder why he is buying hard cover. I tell him the book is better than the movie and the movie wasn’t bad. He forces a quick smile which makes his nostrils flare.
“$24.75” I tell him. I swipe his card, hand him the receipt to sign. I see the boss walk in out of the corner of my eye. The man wants a bag. I put the book into a plastic bag. “Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.” Silence. The man and the boss pass each other.
“Hey boss.” I put the signed receipt into the register and shut the drawer.
“Hi Dennis.”
“There’s a dead fish.”
“A dead fish?”
“Yea. I haven’t seen it yet.”
“Well did you call the fish company?” he asks.
“Not yet.”
“Will you call the fish company and tell them to come get it out?”
“Yea. I’ll do it now.”
I walk towards the back room. I see Mark outside smoking a cigarette. I would like to join him. I go in and sit at the desk and find the fish number on the bulletin board. I dial it. I take a sip of my coffee.
“Hi. We’ve got a dead fish.”
“What is your location?” I tell the guy and he says he’ll send someone this afternoon. I tell the boss and the boss says that is great. Then he asks if I can stay late tonight. I do not want to stay late tonight but I tell him sure.
I walk over to the fish tank. I go quickly. I want to see this fish. Near the kids' section I look down at my blue feet and there is crap all over the carpet. I don’t care about it now but I know I will have to vacuum and scrape it out later. Four years of college to clean lemon poppy-seed muffin and maple scone frosting off the floor. I take a sip of my coffee. It has cooled down a lot.
The tank. I walk the length of it slowly. I see the fish in the bottom left corner. It’s upside down. Eight inches long, four high, a dull silver blue color, raw pink where some of its skin has flaked off. The water pushes the fish up and down which makes it seem like it is still alive. I get as close as I can. I feel the glass tank cool and smooth on my forehead, the only thing separating me from the fish. I imagine the glass bursting and water exploding from the tank, all of the fish flapping about on the floor, smacking their rubber bodies against each other, suffocating on air and carpet fibers. All except for the dead fish, which would lay motionless like a paperweight wherever it landed.
The water pushes the fish closer to me. Popping out from the side of its face is a bulbous yellow sphere, modest, totally indifferent: the eye. I step back from the glass to sip my coffee, more than a sip this time, a swig. One of the mothers is approaching me. The mother is fat and egg shaped but moves fast. A dark brown algae sucker fish moves upon the dead fish and starts opening and closing his lips over the gills. It is being eaten. The mother has huge fluffy hair that bounces as she walks. I can feel her behind me.
“Excuse me.” Another swig. My cup is getting light. The fish is staring at me. A child screams. Screams and starts to cry, starts to ball. It’s an awful howling cry.
I turn around. One of the little girls in plaid is on the ground next to the corner of a book shelf. The mother has stopped walking towards me and is hurrying to the child’s side. I turn back to the fish tank. Take the last drink of coffee, the sweetest sip in the cup, thick with all the sugar that sunk to the bottom.
The ketchup boy walks over to the tank. He’s wearing headphones. He takes them out, says hello. I say hi and he puts his headphones back in. We stand and gaze at the dead fish, bobbing along ever so slowly along the side of the tank. It looks kind of content, like an old man sitting alone on a beach, brown and wrinkled, sweating in his lawn chair. The child is screaming and screaming but the noise is getting farther away. The algae sucker leaves the fish and sucks on the glass in front of us. One of the other silver fish swims over to the dead one, nudges it, looks at its eyeball and keeps swimming.
