SEAN ENNIS / BRAMBLE TROPICAL FISH
BRAMBLE TROPICAL FISH
sells birds, amphibians, reptiles, and the insects they eat too. The store also functions as a front for The Old Rats motorcycle gang, who launder cash, mine cryptocurrencies, and traffic exotic animals there. This isn’t common knowledge.
But some problems have advantages. If you love someone who doesn’t love you back, they might feel bad and still do favors for you. Your wife may die, but she was rich and the fortune is now yours. If the membrane around your brain and spinal cord becomes infected, your moral compass might adjust to find a way to pay the hospital bill. Things like that.
Joel Meningitis—previously handsome, beloved, athletically glorious as a high school senior— is now the lead sales associate at Bramble Tropical Fish. The virus robbed him of thirty pounds and playing time on the basketball team. Even I can’t remember his last name before his ailment. The Old Rats paid his medical debt in an act of kindness and coercion.
But Joel Meningitis was optimistic. He had to be. He was optimistic in the way people who are deeply depressed often are. The Old Rats motorcycle gang had turned Joel into a sort of mascot, using before-and-after photos to advertise their good will and solicit donations.
Joel Meningitis’s first sexual experience had been a failure all around. The act itself was excruciatingly long, and the girl now seemed to hate his guts, and be pregnant with twins. He may not be the father, but the thought hadn’t occurred to him yet. Even I wasn’t sure. His noble impulse was to save his money.
Some consider psychology to be a pseudoscience, but in this case, it’s a useful tool. Powerless in his own life, Joel Meningitis excelled at acting like the demigod of the aquariums and terrariums and cages. He turned a blind eye to the mysterious, squawking packages the Old Rats moved out of the delivery entrance late at night because he felt the motorcycle gang truly cared for him.
Home aquariums can be charming additions to the home/a nice conversation piece, but they are a lot of work. Fish are loveless things, really wretched and dirty. In my new capacity as junior sales associate, I often advise customers against actually putting fish in their tanks.
HOW AM I?
People tell me insane things. They interpret the world as if they are Martians. They choose pain and painful thoughts constantly. Remember, people don’t complain about what they like. I am their treatment plant. But where does a treatment plant go to get treatment? Hardy-har, but it’s valid. There is always so much maintenance. There are eight billion people in this world last I counted. I’m allowed to feel happiness, even if everyone does not.
My friend Shadow and his bad attitude. His wife Wanda and her bad attitude. Their dog Apple and her bad dog attitude. Vivian the Communications Director for The Old Rats Motorcycle Club LLC and my sweetheart and her bad attitude. Eliot the Satanist, aka Lord Miserable, and his evil attitude.The TGI Friday’s bartender and her bad attitude. Joel Meningitis and his bad attitude. My former psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts and their bad attitudes during my grief. I appreciated their efforts, though they were also paid. The experience felt as if I were being told how to swim while on dry land. Best not to think about mirrors too long, what’s really going on there.
I’m a little bored, but it’s nice. Eating crackers in a huge bed. Some nights. I help out at Bramble Tropical Fish, cleaning tanks and flushing the damned after hours. It’s soaking, filthy work, harder than you’d think. The tetras are thankless. But the concept itself is beyond them.
GIVE ME A WORD
Most towns have an ascetic monk receiving divine revelations on their outskirts, and Bramble was no different. The teenagers refer to him as Skinny Ryan, but it seems more neutral to call him Ryan the Hermit. He is not a preacher, and he has no public message. Instead, Ryan is a symbolic object, or a warning, or a clown. He is also just a man. Yes, I visited him on his mountain for insight during the depths of my grief. I asked him to give me a word to relieve my pain, and he did. It is a secret.
Of course, I remember Ryan the Hermit from high school. Go Prowlers!
There were the hasty diagnoses: Ryan’s batshit, also possibly apeshit. Saint Syncletica’s Catholic Church would not claim him. His smell evolved with the seasons: pine woodsmoke in winter, then something truly abominable by June’s heat. It’s not the end of the world.
The word that Ryan the Hermit gave me gets its power from being secret. I should not have mentioned it. It is now less of a secret. It is now less powerful.
What I do remember from high school of Ryan the Hermit was that he had been involved in a fist fight. The two boys fought ridiculously, like boxers, and Ryan was knocked unconscious. There was a sort of ecstasy on his face that made me ill. I only use Ryan the Hermit for certain things, like powerful secrets. He makes good bread.
Sean Ennis is the author of Chase Us: Stories (Little A), Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West), and Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books). He lives in Mississippi.