jack the ripper houdini

Today I'm in awe of my fish. An African lemon cichlid, he is such a beautifully colored, inquisitive little predator. We can't agree on a name for him, so he is alternately Jack and Houdini: the latter because when he was smaller, he once got stuck in the neck of a green soda bottle in his tank, and went in and out of panic mode for almost an hour while figuring out how to escape. But any sympathy for him is short-lived when you consider that he has repeatedly attacked and finally eaten two other blue cichlids of a sister species, as well as a plecostomus. In every case, we were on vacation, and he truly "left no trace." We finally have a pleco who's bigger than he is, so I hope he'll be safe when we leave for the holidays. And then there is Buddha, a small, polka-dotted pleco who's been with him since the beginning, but who is always given over to a kind of trans-existential meditation. I think Jack thinks Buddha so strange and un-fishly that he leaves him alone. Buddha has been known to immerse himself in profound studies of otherness--transforming himself into a hermit crab, and then a barnacle for weeks on end. I can't put any more shells in the tank, or we'll never see him again: when I finally got him out of the barnacle last year, his face was kind of smashed and he didn't look right for a few days. We were hoping the other pleco would teach him how to be one, but no dice. He sometimes rummages around the back of the tank along the ground, but mostly stays totally still, having given up all worldly pursuits in favor of enlightenment. All the while his buddha-belly gets rounder and rounder. Maybe he has a tumor. I don't know, but I feel responsible for them--for their little world, which I in a sense created. I am their sustainer for all practical purposes, and I hate it when there is hunger and death and toxic chemicals and bouts of uneighborliness. I know that I anthropomorphize Jack, especially. He is so yellow and so stuck on himself, he's hard to ignore. He's been swimming up and down all day today, exploring the new dimensions of the tank after I gave back an inch and a half of water that had evaporated. There is a water lily I put in there that just won't grow beyond a few sprigs, because he constantly eats at its roots. Far from paradise, but oh, to be just a fish sometimes. Things are quieter by virtue of being louder, underwater.