Why I Can No Longer Hate the Fish Tank in the Hallway
This is Mac, my cat for a week. I purposely picked an unflattering picture of him because he kept me up all night by alternately crying and running around the room. His general temperament reminded me of Ellen Burstin’s in “Requiem for a Dream.”
He also mocked me while I was doing my super awesome in-room calisthenics.
It’s cool having him around, though. Justin was a little alarmed when he woke up yesterday and found a cat, but not his Cheetos, which I had to put away because apparently Mac likes fake-cheese-covered crunchies as much as Justin (how great is it that Justin has Cheetos for breakfast pretty much every day). But now we’re both talking to Mac like he’s a person, and he’s fitting right in.
This is the point in the story when I tell you that there’s a fish tank in our hallway. It’s the downstairs neighbors’ and it showed up sometime after Christmas. I hate it. It smells, and I don’t understand the point of it. Aquariums are supposed to be used as the classiest kind of decoration, not stuck in a corridor next to an overflowing shoe rack. Also, what is the point of having glassed-in fish as pets (the question could end there) if you keep them outside?
But this morning when I was leaving, I saw the little girl who lives there feeding the fish and realized they were hers. Her parents probably only agreed to let her have them if she kept them outside. (I feel your pain little girl. Similar set of rules for me and my original cat, Colossal.) Still, I had to verify.
“Are those your fish?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Cool,” I said.
I thought about telling her that there was a pet upstairs who wasn’t behind glass that she was welcome to play with, but decided not to since Justin would really be alarmed if he came home and there was a cat and a little girl in the apartment. And they were both eating his Cheetos.
