Since the age of 10, I’ve always had a fear of goldfish. Most people, probably yourself included, laugh a little when they hear it. But I still do. And I’ll tell you why.
I got my first goldfish in the same place that most people do, the fair. The place where I got the rest of my goldfish was much stranger. My first fish, though, had come from a game of ring-toss.
I’d been taken to the fair with my cousin Randall. Our aunt had been visiting and my mom decided it would be good for him and I to get some quality time together. He was 4 years older than me and hulking in size, already taller than my mom. My father joked when he came out of the womb 11 pounds heavy that his mom must have been eating nothing but steaks.
I hadn’t been particularly excited to spend time with him, considering my only memory with Randall had come at his birthday party at age 8, when, after the cake was cut and served, he knocked his piece and the rest of the cake onto the floor in a tantrum. At his behest, his aunt had taken my already cut piece and given it to him to stop his crying. At age 4, and still at age 10, I resented his aunt’s choice to punish me, rather than him, for his anger.
Besides that fond memory, I’d also overheard my mother mentioning to my father that the request for Randall and me to get “quality time” was coming mostly from my aunt, who had found that her son had no friends at school nor summer camp and she couldn’t fathom why. Now, I was to be the guinea pig to what “quality time” with Randall might be like, considering all his peers were wise enough to avoid such time.
All that is to say that the ride to the fair was a quiet one. Randall had chosen to sit up front with my mom and flick with the radio every few moments. My mom had tried a few times to start conversations, asking him what sort of music he liked or if he played any sports, but he kept his answers to simply “all” or “none”. I had been perfectly content in the back seat to stay clear of anything having to require talking to Randall.
When we got to the state fair, my mom sent us loose with a bit of money for whatever games we wanted. Randall seemed aggravated at how little money my mother had given him, and once she’d gone to the car he said, “Give me half of yours”. I hadn’t been particularly used to being bullied or intimidated, so I met his comment with mostly confusion, and informed him that wasn’t how it worked and that I didn’t want to share mine with him. Randall scowled at that and marched away towards the petting zoo.
As with any petting zoo, we smelled it before we saw it. There were lines of similarly-grubby kids poking and prodding at the tired animals behind the fencing, and Randall pushed himself up against the fence. I followed, and saw within it was a ewe with two small lambs. Randall had beckoned one of the lambs over before shoving in his arm to try and yank one of its ears. It moved quickly away from his grasp as he huffed in anger. I told him he shouldn’t be doing that, to which he scowled again and told me that his mother yanked their dogs by the ears all the time if they barked.
Suffice to say, Randall approached the rest of the fair with a similar sadism. By the time he’d spent his last money on missing every ring toss, he seemed on the edge of a meltdown. He informed me as I went up to try that the entire game was rigged. After missing my first four throws, and seemingly out of an urge to prove him wrong, I sunk my last toss on one of the bottles in the back. The ex-con running the stand gave me a thumbs up congratulations and went into the back before returning with a ziplock bag containing a goldfish with two shit-brown fins.
I asked the man behind the stand why this fish looked so awful, especially because closer inspection revealed it appeared half-dead. He seemed to pause for a moment before answering that it was a special breed and sending me on my way.
On the drive back, my mother told me that we had an old fish tank in the garage that she could fill up and put in my bedroom. I nodded in half-excitement as I held up the small bag. I wasn’t confident the fish was going to even survive the ride home. Randall leaned over to the back of the car and gave me a big smile.
“Did you know that if you swallow a goldfish, it can stay alive and swim around in your stomach? It’d eat what you eat whenever it gets dropped down there. It’s like how watermelon seeds can grow if you don’t chew them before swallowing.”
I never considered myself a smart kid, but I paid enough attention during fifth grade biology to know that our stomach was filled with acid. “That’s not true. It’d get all burnt up.” I replied.
Randall grinned wider at me. “It is true. You’re little, so you don’t know. But it is.”
“No it’s not Randall, that’s dumb.”
Randall’s face distorted like he’d just tasted something sour. “IT IS TRUE! YOU FUCKING SHITFACE, IT IS TRUE!”
“Randall!” My mother shouted as she glanced away from the road over to him. “Please don’t speak to your cousin like that.” Randall turned back to the windshield in silence and I shrunk back in my seat, feeling weak in the face of his anger.
The rest of the afternoon I spent largely apart from my cousin. My mom went and got the fish tank out of the garage and started to set it up on my dresser, filling it with water before she realized that the internal filter would have to run for a few hours before I could use the tank. She fetched me a bowl from the kitchen to keep the fish in the meantime, and on her way out asked me what I wanted to name it.
“I don’t know. Fishy-fish?” I said to her, already becoming not-so-fond of the entire ownership process. Looking in, I saw the fish drifting aimlessly around the bowl anyway. I doubted then that it cared much about what happened to it.
“That’s not a very good name, sweetie. Maybe you could ask your cousin if he has any good name ideas for it?”
I shook my head no to her and crept to my bed, grabbing a book to signal that she could now leave me alone.
That night was when it happened. I woke up to the creak of my door closing shut. My room was pitch-black, and I squinted to see what was there. My fingers dug into the blanket and my blood ran cold. “Hello?” I called.
I let out a yelp as Randall’s hand clamped down against my face and held me against the pillow. In the other hand he was gripping something.
“Open your mouth.”
I realized what was in the other hand and wriggled against his grip, shaking my head no beneath his hand.
“OPEN your fucking mouth you shit face. I’m gonna prove what I said. Open your fucking mouth.” Randall’s grip squeezed tighter against my face, cranking back my neck into the pillow. I grabbed at his hand and tried to push it away but he twisted tighter.
“OPEN YOUR MOUTH NOW!” He barked at me as two of his fat, greasy fingers hooked their way under my lip, tearing it upwards. He was pressing my nose closed with his palm and I opened my mouth to suck in a breath.
That’s when he shoved his other sopping wet hand against my mouth. I struggled against him as I felt his hand open and it dropped wriggling into the back of my throat. Up to that point I’d never experienced something as horrible as the sensation of that goldfish sliding along the back of my tongue and worming its way down my throat. Randall forced two fingers in to make sure I wouldn’t bite down and to push it further in. I resisted for a moment before reluctantly swallowing, feeling it moved down my esophagus still alive.
Randall released his grip and moved away from me with a laugh. “If you start screaming and crying, I’m going to make you drink all the water from the bowl too before your parents get here. And that’ll be worse. That’s where the fish has been shitting.”
I sat upright in bed, gagging and sputtering as I pounded at my stomach with my fist. My eyes were brimmed with tears as I coughed over and over, wanting to force the fish back up and out of me. Randall was grinning as he got up to leave. “My aunt says we’re leaving tomorrow morning. I’ll see you at breakfast, shitface.”
He moved out of my room as I cried silently. I continued to sit there, not thinking about anything but trying to just breathe. I glanced over at my alarm clock and saw it was 2:23 A.M. I remembered that my mom always told me to wait about 30 minutes after eating before I swam, because that’s how long it took the food to digest. To me, that meant that in 30 minutes, the fish would be fully burnt up by the acid, and I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. I shut my eyes and tried not to picture it flopping around in the acid, being slowly and painfully melted into goo. I hoped it would suffocate first, or that its brain would get burnt up so there wouldn’t be any pain. I held back sobs at the idea of how horrible it was.
At 2:48 was when the bad things started happening. By that time I’d convinced myself that the fish had been so near-death already that it probably didn’t even feel any of it happening. I’d wiped away my tears, settled myself down against the pillow, and figured I’d tell my parents about what happened once Randall had left the house and was far far away from me. I closed my eyes and took in a breath.
And that was when I felt something flick against my belly button. For a moment, I thought it might just be the blanket. But then it happened again, harder this time. And I realized it wasn’t coming from the outside.
My breathing quickened as I tore the blanket away and yanked up the shirt of my pajamas. Pale moonlight was strewn across the bare, freckled flesh of my stomach. For a moment, there was nothing. And then I saw the round shape pressing from beneath the skin.
It couldn’t be possible. Even then I knew that wasn’t how stomachs worked. It had to be some horrible nightmare I was having. But the goldfish continued to press against my belly button before moving its way upwards and suddenly snaking a sharp right. The fish began to squeeze its way between two of my ribs to make its way around me. I stifled a scream before raising my hand up and slapping it down against the wriggling bump in the center of my ribcage.
The fish disappeared for a moment. My eyes were wide as I stared, hoping that had killed it. Then, I felt it worming its way back up at the base of my neck. Beneath my skin I could feel the small mouth opening and closing, chewing just like it did for the fish flakes, as it stretched against my flesh.
I stopped myself again from screaming as I staggered up to my feet and ran to the bathroom. The harsh light stung my eyes as I stared at the mirror, watching the bump swimming around underneath my flesh. It moved its way up to my throat, pushing over my not-yet-formed Adam’s apple before darting back down. I tried to squeeze it with my fingers, cup it from all directions to stop it from moving but whenever I did, I could feel the little teeth starting to gnaw at me from the inside.
“Get out get out get out” I began to whimper over and over. I shut my eyes and continued to slap blindly, when suddenly I felt it disappear and reappear somewhere new. My heartbeat exploded in my chest as I tugged at my pajama bottoms. “Please get out, please get out.” My voice was moving towards a scream now as I saw the lumpy shape sliding about my scrotum, pressing against the skin and gnashing its teeth around my testicles like it was trying to make its way out.
I felt my vision blur near unconsciousness at the sight, and I stumbled over to the toilet, catching myself from cracking my head as I leaned down over it. I opened my mouth to scream for help before I felt it worming its way up my throat. The fish was moving back out the way it came, and I was certainly inclined to help it as I felt my stomach turn and my vomit come flooding out with it. The fish landed in the toilet bowl along with my meal from earlier that night. Its sideways eye glanced up at me. It seemed to almost be taunting me for a second.
That’s when I felt my stomach turn once more. I opened my mouth to retch but this time I felt, instead of vomit, piles of struggling, slimy fish making their way up my throat. They slid along my tongue, scraped along my esophagus, filling my mouth with their gelatinous bodies. I spewed maybe 40 or 50 baby goldfish into the toilet, coughing away the muck they dragged with them before I began to gag and spewed up more. I continued to vomit out the critters until the entire toilet bowl had been filled and they began to spill out of the sides onto the floor. At that point, my stomach finally settled, and I stared down at the mess before me. This is where I got the rest of my goldfish.
At this point, the experience had been horrific enough that my entire world-view had been altered. Staring at that toilet, I did believe that perhaps I had encountered the devil or some servant of his. An alternative theory was that this fish was some sort of God with great powers to punish and destroy. Either way, I wasn’t going to risk further anger. I ran to the kitchen, dug out a small pot, and began filling it with water. Scooping them with my hands and sorting them from the vomit, I transferred every baby safely to the tank in my room. When it had become crowded, or a level of crowding I figured might discomfort the fish, I began to fill up kitchen bowls with them.
Once I’d parsed through the last handful of babies, I saw the final fish himself, still staring up at me from the toilet with that taunting look. I scooped him up with my hand and placed him into a ziplock bag, a few times larger than the one I’d received him in. I thought the rest of that night about what to do with him.
The next morning, I draped a cloth over the piles of fish before going down to breakfast, not wanting to have my mother questioning anything until I’d figured out a proper way to explain it all. My cousin maintained a shit-eating grin all throughout as he dug into his eggs, asking me at one point if I’d like some lox on my bagel instead of just butter. I chose not to respond, just asking to be excused early to go wash my hands before goodbyes. Instead, I slipped into the guest bedroom where Randall had left his backpack and luggage.
In the 19 odd years since this happened to me, I’d run through a number of prevailing theories as to what it all might have been. The dominant one I’ve shakily maintained is that the fish I’d swallowed was pregnant and bacteria-ridden. That was why it had looked so strange when I’d gotten it. Once I’d swallowed it, it must have spewed out all those babies that I regurgitated. There must have been some sort of bacteria in its skin that caused me to hallucinate the movement beneath my flesh. This is the theory I tell myself now. But still, there are two obvious holes in it.
The first was that there was no logic behind how many baby fish I regurgitated. The amount to fill up the toilet far exceeded what a fish could hold in their belly. For that reason, I kept every one of those fish until they died. I buried each one in the backyard, and didn’t flush a single fish. I didn’t want to risk any upset. The last fish died about 7 years ago. None of them ever mated.
The second hole was what happened to my cousin on the drive back. Apparently the wheel of the car slid beneath something on the road, causing the vehicle to swerve and take a nose-dive off a small bridge. The water they landed in wasn’t deep, maybe 3 feet, but the car had fallen about 15 feet. When the EMS smashed open the windows, they’d found my aunt had died on impact. When they found out through a call to her husband that she had been driving with her son, the EMS were baffled that they couldn’t find his body in the car.
After combing the river and a brief manhunt to determine he hadn’t just run away, the authorities came up with their own prevailing theory. His body, along with his backpack (the only thing missing), must have been dragged into the nearby sewer pipe by an alligator. That was their only explanation. My mother told me this while weeping into my shoulder. When she said that I needed to “Be sure to keep Mr. Fishy-Fish around to remember them”, I decided not to tell her that I’d placed him carefully in Randall’s backpack before he left.