It’s a Hard World for Little Things is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Thursday, June 05, 2008. It is part of Journal.
An inter-species eulogy.
The soundtrack for this piece is Ghost of His Smile, a song about a dog, by Sparklehorse:
1. We must appease the rain gods.
2. The car likes it when you shift gently.
3. My mother believes that the stray cats she feeds on her fire escape are jealous of her dog’s privileged position indoors.
We’re social animals that succeed or fail based on how we interact with others. The evolutionary arms race between our hominid ancestors was won by the ones best able to model and manipulate the minds of their fellows — detecting lies, currying favor, climbing up the social hierarchy. One side-effect of millions of years of specialization in mind-reading is that we cannot avoid applying the same cognitive framework to things that are not like us: the weather1, inanimate objects2, our pets3.
He don't get out much these days / but I wouldn't call him lazy
We had dogs when I was a boy, along with the occasional cat, but I haven’t kept pets during my adult life, primarily because I live in a small flat and travel frequently, which seems like an unfair situation for a companion animal. This pattern was broken around two and a half years ago, when I walked past the window of a Chinatown pet shop and saw a splendid blue and red veiltail Siamese fighting fish shimmering in the sun. He stood out from the other fish; there was just something special-seeming about him, and I couldn’t resist his charms.
A pair of Betta splendens beneath a bubble nest.
We thought that he was doing alright / as the sun chased down another night
I called him Fish, aka Señor Pescado, and developed the strange attachment one does — talking to him, catching moths to feed him, and generally treating him like a little fishy person. Forewarned was not forearmed, and full knowledge of our projective tendencies made no difference: Fish was my friend, and his wiggling water dance brought me a kind of joy.
4. A line from the movie Night of the Hunter, delivered by an old woman who tends the protagonist’s children after they see an owl take a rabbit. It probably goes without saying that we’re all, in the grand scheme, little things.
Dogs will wag their tails and birds will sing / it's a hard world for little things4
Over the last few months, he lost his vigor and his appetite. He grew harder to rouse from slumber and didn’t even bother with live insects dropped into his bowl. His color started to fade. The internet warned me that he was getting on in years, but I thought he was doing alright.
We thought that he was doing alright
5. For an age of ages (1000 times 1000 years, an ancient idiom for “forever”), go in peace.
He was dead when I got out of bed this morning, and — although he was both a fish and Thai — I found myself speaking over him in Latin, “in saecula saeculorum, pax vobiscum5.” The absurdity of this isn’t lost on me, nor do I fail to see the mawkish sentimentality in the moment of heartbreak I felt as his tiny body fluttered to the bottom of the toilet boil in a sad parody of swimming.
I can't forget the ghost, I can't forget the ghost, I can't forget the ghost / of his smile
It’s a small loss, but still a loss, to add Fish to the long list of friends I won’t see again. My list, I know, will get longer every year, until the day I appear on someone else’s. It’s a hard world for little things.