Killing Them Softly (Part of the "Secrets We Shouldn't Share" series)

 Two dark, hollow eyes stared at me -- well, one open mouth stared at me, and two dark, hollow eyes stared out, one to the east and one to the west. Like the remora to my whale shark, I thought that our symbiosis was simple -- I maintain a relatively soap-free environment in the water basin, and the beta fish eats any foreign matter that falls, jumps or wriggles into my bathing water. But looking around the sharp edges of its hungry mouth into the sorrowful corona of its convex eyes, I realized it needed more out of our relationship -- namely, a more consistent source of food.

I know, it seems so obvious: feed your fish. But I bought this sucker because I had an infestation of larvae in my basin, and when I was told to buy a beta fish, no one told me that it would greedily eat all of the larvae, leaving itself in an isolated, foodless environment. I don't want my fish friend to go hungry, but manufactured fish food does NOT smell good, and there is noooo way that I'm sprinkling a new, chum-scented cologne into my bathwater. My dislike of antiperspirants provides enough of an olfactory challenge in my daily life -- I don't need to also smell like a dingy aquarium shop. And so I watched my fish get skinnier and skinnier, until I could no longer plead innocent obliviousness. Fish? What fish? Skinny? What do you mean? Well, slender, maybe... but, really? Too skinny? I don't know...

Determined to feed my aquatic-friend, and unwilling to purchase and release additional mosquito larvae into my water basin, I've taken up an unsavoury practice:

murder in the form of insecticide.

It is rainy season here, and there are a lot of mosquitoes buzzing around. I'm going to kill some anyway, as I attempt to stop the theft of my blood. Rather than wiping away the remains, I tenderly nudge them with the tip of my finger until they stick, hanging loosely. I walk into the bathroom, careful not to shake loose the corpse, and tap the tip against the meniscus, simultaneously loosing the body onto the surface of the water and sending out the Morse code for "Dinner's Ready". For a moment, I feel like a daring Paleontologist hired to hand-feed goats and sheep to the Velociraptors* in Jurassic Park -- except that I am feeding smashed insects to a scrawny fish in my boarding house bathroom. Rather than resembling a bronzed, rugged scientist, I've developed a pale, nerdy-likeness with Rick Moranis's Seymour from The Little Shop of Horrors -- his doppelganger in an Indonesian alternate universe.

Now, I do have some standards for this process. It is, after all, still my bathwater, and while I may let a fish swim through it, I won't throw just anything into the water. Two laws guide my practice -- the insect body must remain intact, and it must be a dry kill. We've all had that moment where we catch a mosquito during -- or recently after -- a feeding, and the smack of the palm is met with a bloody splat. And while I have accepted that my bathwater might not be so sterile, I can't bring myself to drop a blood-soaked carcass into the water. So the second rule keeps foreign fluids out of the water, and the first minimizes the number of legs and wings floating around in the aftermath of a feeding.

And now for the scariest details: Having watched my fish regain its health through our continued feedings, I am determined to maximize these feedings. Thus, I've softened the impact of my slap against the mosquitoes, hoping to minimize the number that are smashed or that splurt blood. It is with a newfound tenderness that I hunt the mosquitoes across my bedroom, seeing them not as pests or enemies, but as tiny teammates who sacrifice themselves for the health of my fish. Cue the bongos: I've entered my own twisted version of The Lion Kings "Circle of Life", where I encourage mosquitoes to enter my room so that I may kill them softly and feed them to my beta fish, ensuring that he will live on to eat any of their larvae, should any of them survive long enough in my bedroom to reproduce and violate my water basin with their squiggly young.

*Can you believe that the spell-check function disagrees that this is a valid word?