Wet Nightmares

Slip, plop, slide, pop! The dark and soggy childhood nightmare still creeps back into my mind, especially after I see a fish tank.

It was the middle shop in a row of stores, years before its like would be called a strip mall. We called it the fish store, I don't remember the name on the sign. We first went there to buy fish food for those goldies swimming in jelly jars at home, recently won by throwing ping pong balls into jars at the church fiesta.

The place had an atmosphere all of its own. The moistness of the air. The gurgling sound of the bubbling filters, the bright flashes of scaly bodies darting around little castles and treasure chests within the watery jails. The odd smell of what we figured must be rotting fish, or fish food, or, wasn't that the same thing?

The storefront wasn't particularly wide, but the shop itself was very deep. There were two long aisles that went all the way to the back, each lined with walls of rectangular aquariums stacked three high. Neon tetras, swordtails, weird suckerfish with their lips fused to the glass. The captivating red eared slider turtles in the back of the store, sunning on rocks under the heat lamps.

My younger brother Billy was fascinated with the store. He was too little to go there alone, but he was allowed to go with me. He'd hop on the banana seat of his Stingray and I'd climb on my Schwinn three-speed and we'd pedal off. Billy would chat with the lady at the cash register, and get her teenage son Tim to point out some of the more interesting creatures, like mystery snails. Sometimes the body of a dead fish bobbed at the water's surface near a filter, floating in a macabre dance, until Tim scooped it out with a small blue net.

On March 31, 1971, we headed down to the store. By then, Billy's home water world included a 16 inch tank with a filter, our three fiesta goldfish, one bristlenose catfish, and vivid lime green gravel. He had saved his allowance money, and was thinking about getting one of those pirate chests with the pearls hanging out.

As usual, we went down the aisles, admiring the fish. A young mother with a stroller lifted her toddler out so she could see their brilliantly colored bodies, the shiver of their gills, the graceful sweep of their tails. Their quickness! And just as quickly, the earthquake hit!

We were deep in the back of the store. The mother starting screaming, echoed by her squealing, wiggling daughter.

"Get out, get out!" yelled the lady at the front of the store.

The water was sloshing right out of the tops of the aquariums! The linoleum floor tiles were already wet and slick. We heard a sharp noise and saw a crack on one of the larger glass fronts.

"Let's go!" Billy hollered at me. I seemed to be glued in place, remembering the big earthquake a month earlier. The quake that cracked the dam, which had forced our family to evacuate our house for a week, just in case the dam broke.

Billy pushed his hands against my back, hard, and we started running down that seemingly endless slippery aisle, trying to keep our feet as we slid on that linoleum. A few plump fish frantically gasped and splashed on the floor. Just as we passed that cracked aquarium, it failed, and the six-to-eight inch oscars started flopping out. Their bodies flipped and their tails slapped the floor as we passed them. Luckily they were easy to see with their mottled orange colors, and we avoided stepping on them. Some of the smaller fish weren't so lucky, their bodies grotesquely popping as they squished under the soft soles of our Red Ball Jets. Billy later told me that they were mostly guppies, the feeder fish, so they weren't much of a loss. We saw Tim grabbing the bigger fish by their tails and tossing them into a bucket. He had a sad expression of disbelief, lips quivering as he held back his tears, his mouth moving in tandem with those of the suffocating fish.

Once outside, the lady wanted us to stay so that she could see if we were hurt, and to call our parents to come and pick us up. Instead, we grabbed our bikes and took off. I winced as I thought about fish guts transferring to my pedals. We made it home and later found out it was an aftershock, 4.6 on the Richter Scale, according to Caltech seismologists.

My nightmares started that very night. Except the run through the aquarium gauntlet is never-ending: we are trapped in an aquarium. Tim is there blocking our escape, he has gills and an open, floppy mouth gasping for air. The lady shrieking "get out, get out!" adds to our terror as we frantically realize that we cannot get out. The fish on the floor are bigger, there are too many of them to avoid, and we are barefoot. We distinctly feel the scales, the bones, the bursting wet bodies of every type of fish imaginable under our tender, suffering feet.

The frequency of the nightmares subsided as I grew older. It had been many years since I'd had one. Then my husband led my grinning son out of the games area at his preschool's carnival. He was proudly clutching a plastic bag filled with water and a single goldfish.