Roberta didn’t leave her little apartment much these days. She really didn’t see the point. It was always so gloomy or too hot or too snowy to even enjoy the outdoors. She had her TV and a pretty good view of the street below from her third floor window. She mostly kept to herself and tried to be as obscure as possible. This was often complicated however by her weight. She admittedly had let herself go in the last few years and it was harder to stay under the radar in the hallway as she shuffled up from the lobby to her apartment door. Her only saving grace from not becoming a total shut in was the three flights of winding stairs she had to climb. That at least kept her limber enough not to become what her mother called, “A burden on society”.
She did have a friend in the building. Her neighbor Sally across the hall was very sweet and polite. She had only just moved in. They would often chat in the hallway or see each other in the lobby and share some details about themselves. Roberta was happy to have made a friend in the building. It can get pretty lonely at times. She and Sally actually broke the apartment complex’s rules about using a grill on their communal back porch. It was a little thing but Roberta felt she had a real cohort in crime, a real girlfriend to whisper things about the other tenants to. Sally was certainly a change from the old tenants that lived across the hall. There was a young couple that Roberta called ‘the Bickersons’ living there previously. They just yelled and screamed and seemed to smash things a lot. She was tempted to call the police on several occasions but then thought it really wasn’t any of her business.
Sally had made a very bold request of Roberta recently. Sally said she had to go out of town for a week and wondered if Roberta could please watch after her cat. All she had to do was come in, check the food and replace the water and maybe give the cat a little pat here and there. Nothing too complicated. Roberta agreed to do it because she didn’t want to be rude to her new friend. But Roberta couldn’t stand cats. She felt they were the jerks of the animal kingdom, right up there with Hyenas and Coyotes. But she’d do as her new friend asked; no sense in losing a friend over something as silly as animal behavior. Sally only made one other request of Roberta and that was not to peek under the pink scarf on the dining room table. She didn’t say anything more about it.
Roberta unlocked Sally’s front door on Monday and called out to the cat. But she didn’t see it. She wasn’t even sure if it was a boy cat or a girl cat. She checked and saw the cat food bowl was full and the water bowl was good. She looked around for the cat again, calling out as she’d seen on TV, “Here Kitty, kitty, kitty”. But the cat never came out. She sighed and was about to leave when she heard something that sounded like water splashing. She looked to the dining room and in the middle of the wood table was a fishbowl covered with a big pink scarf.
The top of the scarf looked wet and there was some water on the table. Roberta worried the cat might have tried to get in there. Then she wondered why Sally didn’t mention she had any other pets. Roberta bent down and tried to peer under the scarf and could only make out a little water swirling around the bowl. The water was moving in a whirlpool fashion, like kids in a backyard pool all swimming the same direction and then getting pulled along by the force of the water. It was moving fast. Roberta reached out to the scarf but remembered she promised Sally she wouldn’t peek under the scarf. She stared to turn away and head back toward her apartment when she heard the splashing sound again. It sounded like something had dropped into the bowl. She turned around and saw there was more water on the table and the scarf had become slightly dislodged. She could now see into the fishbowl.
Hovering in the water, staring right at her, was the biggest goldfish she’d ever seen. It seemed somehow to be too big for the bowl but then wasn’t. She remembered a garden party she went to many years ago and the guy she was kind of sweet on, who she later caught in the upstairs bathroom with Megan Rogers, had a Koi pond and he had some really big goldfish. But this one, on Sally’s table, seemed different.
The fish started swimming around the bowl again, faster and faster until it was almost a blur. Roberta couldn’t take her eyes off it. As it swam, its scales seemed to reflect the sunlight coming from the kitchen windows creating a shimmering all trough the room. Roberta almost felt dizzy and she grabbed for one of the dining room chairs. Just as she reached out the goldfish leapt out from the bowl straight up into the air, seemed to pause and then splashed back down into the water.
Roberta swore. She never swore any more. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually said the “F” word. The goldfish was again floating in the bowl, staring at her. It’s fins gently pushing the water about. The pink scarf had now fallen completely away from the bowl. Roberta didn’t know what to do. She thought about clapping. It was amazing to see a goldfish do something like that. She looked around and suddenly saw Sally’s cat. Roberta thought the cat would probably try to eat the goldfish if it got the chance, jerk cat. She thought about shooing the cat away but she didn’t have to. The cat darted from the room like a shot.
Roberta looked back at the goldfish and it had grown into something the size of an old refrigerator was now hovering over her. It was standing on its little tailfins from out of the bowl. Its innocent eyes were now filled with blood and something like a tongue was reaching out for her from the giant monster goldfish’s mouth. Roberta tried to scream and run but she was frozen in place. Her only thought was of why Sally would have this thing as a pet. And then she thought Sally wasn’t perhaps a very good friend at all.
The goldfish tongue lashed around Roberta’s throat and lifted her of the ground and the goldfish swallowed her in one big gulp. A slipper popped off her foot and flopped to the floor as the fish sucked down Roberta’s leg like Spaghetti. A moment later, a wet hand reached down and picked the slipper up. Sally tried the slipper on and walked to her mirror leaving one wet footprint behind her as she went. She looked in her mirror and brushed off the remaining golden scales on her skin. She modeled the slipper on her foot, hated it and kicked it off toward the corner. She went back to her dining room table and took out the newspaper to look at the new apartment rental ads as her cat mewed in the background.
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