The Tale of the Disappearing Fish

    We recently gave our fish tank away, it's been empty since our last fish, Hitler, died. This is the story of Hitler, how he got his name, and an interesting incident in our fish tank. I think I've written about this before, so I'll try and make that part of the story brief.
    Once upon a time, we had a fish tank. It was a 55 gallon long. Which I believe means it was long, but not very tall. We had two fish in it, I don't remember what kind they were. One day, Hubs and Jesse came home with a new fish for the tank. They were warned at the fish store that the fish we already had in the tank might attack the new kid on the block. In the tank he went. He was only about the size of a quarter.


    The next day, one of the original two fish was badly damaged. One of his fins was all chewed up, and he was swimming funny. It seems the new guy was tougher than the old ones. the next day, the other fish was all beat up. Hubs put a divider in the tank, to keep the two kinds of fish apart. It didn't work. The new fish somehow got over or around the divider, and continued to attack the old fish, until they both died.


    And that is how Hitler got his name. He performed an ethnic cleansing in the tank. Also in the tank were two algae eating fish called pleckos. Jesse named them Johnny Tight Lips and Frankie the Squealer. He was pretty young, maybe 8. For some reason, Hitler let them live. He never bothered them.


    One day, when I got up, I noticed that the fish tank was totally green. I mean like pea soup. Nothing we tried worked. Hubs changed the filter cartridges, and other things that I can't remember now. We couldn't see into the tank. I knew Hitler was still there because he would come to the surface when I fed him.


    It was literally weeks that the tank was green like that. One day, I noticed it was a little less green. Gradually, over the next few days, the tank water returned to normal. And once we could see in, we noticed that one of the pleckos was gone. He never turned up, either. We never found a body, or pieces, or bones. Jesse, in his infinite wisdom, decided that Frankie the Squealer was the missing fish, and Hitler had had him killed because Frankie was gonna squeal to the cops.


    By the time he died, Hitler was about 7 inches long. We still miss that fish. I used to like to mess with him, I used a laser pointer and pointed it at him. He didn't like that, he would visibly change color, and come to the nearest corner of the tank and stare at me. If a fish could look agitated and angry, he sure could.


    It seems that getting rid of the fish tank brought back some memories. I gotta tell you, I never thought that Hitler would live so long! He must've been at least 10 years old when he finally passed.