R.I.P. Zacky

A week ago Friday we lost our first pet: a tiny guppy named Zacky whose “sister” Zoey is now swimming lonely in her tank. We’d had both fish several months and Rob and I can’t tell them apart (much less assess their gender), but Will at least likes to think that he knows which is which. So it was Will who told us that it was Zacky who died. He was a bit sad – Zacky was his favorite fish, he said. But he knows we’ll get a replacement soon.

I discovered Zacky’s death just minutes before we had friends arriving for a playdate, so I scooped him up along with some water from the tank and stored him in an empty pill bottle for a later burial. Then we had rainstorms Saturday and snowstorms Sunday, so Zacky stayed in limbo in the pill bottle until Monday, when Will and I buried him behind a tree in our backyard along with a bit of the water and a few blue rocks from his fish tank. We said a simple prayer of sorts and Will found a rock that would serve as his headstone. Today, a week later, Will finally painted a fish on the headstone in acrylic paint, wrote Zacky in permanent marker and laid it on the grave. He adorned the site with pinecones and camellias. We kind of miss that inch-long fish.