I realized not too long ago that works as a metaphor too

Death surrounds the world of aquarium and hobby fish retail. Anytime you put that many small creatures with an already short life expectancy into cramped quarters, rarely feed them, and chase them around their home a few times a day with a green plastic net you can probably expect a few casualties. It comes with the territory.

There are a few different deaths, varied styles, that can befall the unfortunate fish. Few of them are graceful, though I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who can maintain their dignity while dying publicly in a glass display case, fish or not. The closest would have to be the one-minute-you're-fine-swimming-happily-in-circles-back-and-forth-across-the-front-of-the-tank-the-next-you're-belly-up-caught-in-the-tiny-whirlpool-of-suction-as-the-filter-hums-undisturbed-below-you death. Which happens more often than you'd think.

Another quick end is death by hungry tank mate or distracted store clerk as she absentmindedly sucks you into her vacuum (while supposedly making the tank a nicer place for you to live). She'll gasp the last profanity you'll ever hear before your tiny body breaks and the two pieces of you slide down the algae colored tube into a collective vat of fish garbage.

Of course, there's also the day long fight for life where you float perpendicular to the ground at the mercy of the water's air bubble turbulence, only perking up and swimming straight when you see the green of the net hovering overhead. Maybe you'll fool them again. Buy yourself another hour or two.

Sometimes death comes from a botched escape attempt. Like when the cover is left off a tank and one of your brothers takes advantage of the rare opportunity to explore the world. You watch as he gets as far as the tile floor or maybe the next aisle over and flops helplessly around collecting bits of dirt and hair before his once glistening body dries and hardens. He waits in a dull stillness for his mind's death to catch up with his body's. Once you remember seeing this happen to a swordfish from the tank above yours. Only just seconds before the air took her over a well meaning patron scooped her up and dropped her in the tank nearest his convenience. The carnivorous cichlids finished her off before he even had the time to circle back and realize what he had done.

Diseases are bad as your eyes crust over or your gills open up in two identical gaping red sores. You're taken to the back of the store and confined to the 'hospital' tank under the pretense of quarantining, medicating, and curing you. So you stew in chemicals surrounded by strangers unrecognizable by their own grotesquities, until ultimately your disease gets the best of you, or perhaps it's one of theirs.

Or let's say you do make it and you survive. But you survive a bit too long and your season ends, like the pond fish in fall. Out comes the big black garbage bag and you pray to be one of the last to go in so you can suffocate quickly on the top while your comrades squirm beneath you loudly gasping your death through their mouths and gills while begging for their own.

When I worked at Wally's one of my favorite things was cleaning the tank where the rosies were kept. It was a huge tank in the back room filled with little whitish pink fish with red eyes used exclusively to feed more expensive fish. Rosies aren't the strongest swimmers and when I put the electric vacuum in the bottom of the tank by the time the water got to only two inches high there would be about fifty of the little fish pressed up against the blue machine's mesh underside. When I'd turn it off they would pour out excitedly. Stretching their fins and darting back and forth, touching every side of the tank before settling back down as I switched hoses and the water level once again began rising.