The goldfish was plaintive. I hadn't cleaned its bowl in a week and I hadn't fed it. How long does it take for a goldfish to starve? Fuck that, it's not going to starve. I hadn't really eaten in three days either and I was fine. Fuck him, he can handle it. It probably can't starve anyway. I'd just been laying on my couch drifting in and out of sleep, cigarette butts all over the floor to one side. I just kept thinking it over, and over.
"This goldfish is Wrath embodied," the old man had whispered, "he is the physical manifestation of all that is murder and hatred, a thread hanging from a fabric woven infinite from terror and bloodlust, weaving across the myriad planes of existence."
"What should I do?" I asked. This goldfish was to have been a gift for a lady friend.
"There is nothing you can do. This goldfish is but the tiniest hair on the head of a sleeping giant, however fretful that sleep. Disturb it, pull the orange cork which plugs the hole from that realm and our own, and the results will be unspeakable."
"But-"
"Go!" the old man screamed, "take this black avatar, this conduit to realms beyond comprehension, and leave this place! It is yours now, and yours shall it remain!"
So, a week. After I got home and put it in the bowl, the weight of the fish struck me. I looked into his dead eyes and saw a black hole - huge, infinite, burgeoning, hidden in something so small. It stared at me. Did it know? He? Capital It? I pictured a torrent of black and red, pouring like water through a drain and being sucked, unstoppable, into my apartment.
When I sleep, it's like a fever. I'm not really asleep, but I'm not really awake. I see my room as if in negative, but where the fish is, I see something obversely huge, like a starless sky. I get this irrational fear that my apartment walls will crumble and I will be lost in this Nothing.
The bowl is getting so dirty I can barely see the fish. I'm scared it'll get away somehow. I need to put it in something and clean its bowl. But I'm scared to do that too. If something happens to me, and this is all you read, then I love you. And if something happens to you, too, then I'm sorry.