=20 Gallon Universe=

When I was a child we had a series of fish tanks and it seemed that there was always one fish that rapidly grew bigger and faster than all the others. He—I always assumed it was a “he”—became the King of the Tank.

It was never enough that this fish had the run of the whole tank, from one glass wall to the other, side to side, front to back. No, the King of the Tank always had to find the smallest, weakest fish at which time he would commence a program of constant harassment that always ended the same way. He would hunt that fish from behind the most obscure rock, from the densest thicket of plant-growth, from inside the most remote and uninteresting shell in the tank. He would chase and nip at its fins and tail until the small fish lay ragged and gasping and exhausted on the filthy gravel too weak even to rise to the surface for food. I would sprinkle dried fish flakes directly above it, hoping some would go uneaten by the other fish and make their way to the bottom close enough for it to eat, but in spite of my skill at this operation the other fish would catch most of the falling food first and what they didn’t scarf down the injured fish seemed too weak and terrified to go for, even if it were only an inch or two away from it’s laboring mouth.

Sometimes I'd stand by the tank for up to an hour waiting for the King of the Tank to dive and attack and then I’d flick my finger loudly on the glass just like I was told never ever to do, risking my father’s wrath, to scare the big fish off. It worked, but not for long; fish, I guess, not having very long memories and, of course, I couldn’t be there all the time. I often fantasized about scooping the King of the Tank out and quarantining him an old jelly jar or throwing him into the tiger lily patch in the backyard where I wouldn’t have to see him flop to his death but I never did either, paralyzed by fear of what my father would do if he found out and cowed by the ethical dilemma of exercising such godlike power of life and death over another creature. 

Inevitably, the morning would come when I’d find the gnawed, faded body of the little fish floating among the yellow leaves sucked near the filter. I would scoop it out using the pocket-sized green net and march it cold-eyed to the toilet as I’d done many times before with many other small, weak, doomed-from-the-start fish. “That’s the way the universe works,” my father would explain, seeming, it seemed to me both then and now, satisfied that he was teaching me something invaluable about life, something that would help me survive in the world, this being back in the days before he split.