Story Mining

Ella Fish died tonight. She was a bright blue betta fish with streaks of red in her tail that fanned out behind her when she swam like hair being blown back by a strong Kansas wind. She was a male betta fish but since my daughter named her and insisted it was a girl, Ella Fish became female in all our minds. We would shake her fish food near her tank, a small pentagon shaped plastic container with colored rocks and neon vibrant trees arranged on top of them, and she would swim up excitedly near the water line, opening and closing her mouth in anticipation.

Ella Fish died tonight because my daughter was supposed to be sleeping, but instead decided she wanted a closer look at her favorite pet. She’s three years old and has all the understanding of life and death that other typical American three-year-olds have, which is to say only the vaguest. And yet, she is empathic enough to understand that something had gone horribly wrong when she’d finally caught Ella Fish only to have the slippery little thing fall from her hand and onto her Minnie Mouse bed sheets. From there, Ella Fish somehow ended up on the floor of her rainbow rug with a plastic container put over her. My daughter then came into the living room and implored us to come see something in her bedroom. There was an urgency in her voice that I didn’t like, and I expected disaster. Cynically, I assumed she had broken something. I guess I wasn’t completely wrong.

Once in her bedroom, my daughter sat on her bed and started crying. Still baffled as to what was going on, I put my arms around her and rocked her a bit while my wife, standing in the doorway, asked her, “Honey, what’s wrong?” The little three-year-old girl in my arms managed to squeak out something about Ella Fish and I looked to the tank and saw it was slightly ajar. I scanned her room and spotted her as I have already described: rainbow rug, plastic container placed over her. My wife saw it too and gasped loudly. She sat on the bed and my daughter left my arms and let her Mama hold her for a while.

Once she’d calmed down enough, my wife took her into the living room while I prepared to clean up the crime scene. I took a pink clothing hanger and used it to push Ella Fish into the plastic cup that had been covering her. She started writhing horribly and painfully, her mouth opening and shutting the way she did when expecting food. I pushed through the awfulness of this moment and rushed her to the bathroom thinking, she’ll make it! What a tough little fish! I turned the faucet on and the water came blasting out, swirling Ella Fish around as though she were caught up in a whirlpool. Carpet debris, strands of hair and lint swirled around with her. Her once smooth pretty tail fins were tattered and ruined the way a piece of cloth looks after being sucked up and yanked out of vacuum cleaner.

From the living room I could hear my daughter between sobs, “But… if Ella becomes trash… she won’t… be my pet anymore.”

The hardy betta fish swam around in her new filthy home, but at an angle that said it was just a matter of time before the end. In the meantime, she was suffering. We decided on doing the humane thing and put an end to Ella Fish’s misery.

What exactly does any of this have to do with writing? I’ll tell you.
A year ago I decided one of the many books I’d like to write is a nonfiction account of my family and the heart disease that almost all of us (my two kids included) have inherited. I’ve sat down to try writing this thing, mining my memories for that moment when I learned I’d need a pacemaker at twenty-two years old, conjuring that feeling of waking up in the middle of the night to find out my mother had died in her sleep, or trying to recall that feeling when a pediatric cardiologist told us that my daughter’s heart looked so bad that surgery was all but inevitable. I spent a lot of time staring at a blinking cursor against a white background. I attempted to pull a more recent memory, that pit in my stomach, nearly nauseating feeling when we were told my son needed to be hurried over to Children’s Mercy due to the severity of his heart defect. Still, nothing came out.

There’s line that has to be walked when you are a feeling, thinking, human being, but are also that strange, introspective, analyzing creature called a writer. As a writer I see people interacting in a unique or funny way and that gets filed away to come out later as a scene in a story. A coworker confesses some peculiar habit and suddenly that personality quirk belongs to the very fictional Edward St. Pierre, the Midwest’s most famous demonologist. And now that Ella Fish has met her untimely demise, I’ve come away from this minor tragedy with another feeling in my authorial arsenal. It’s a feeling that was born where my frustration with my three year old’s foolish act, the queasy sadness of seeing Ella Fish’s mangled form attempt to continue living, and the utter heartbreak of seeing my child anguished and remorseful for what’s happened to her favorite pet, all meet in a quagmire of ineffable emotions.

As strange as it sounds, I can’t do justice to a piece of writing about sitting with my child in the hospital while a team of pediatric cardiologists monitor every heartbeat, the blood pressure cuff hums to life every thirty minutes, and alarms sound off a dire warning every time to oxygen reader falls off the tiny baby finger. At least, I can’t do it justice if I try to remember what that felt like, because my mind had no intention of gathering the details, and filing away for later use that feeling of dread whenever a team of white lab coat wearing professionals walked into the room. I just wanted everything to turn out all right. And for the most part, it has. It’s these minor tragedies that I can come back to, and mine for content, then shape and mold and embellish and hopefully create something worth reading, but that is firmly rooted in something just as real and just as personal.