We had a death in the fish tank last night. Our tiny little Blue Tang Dory (just like in the movie)… Well, I was going to say she was “sleeping with the fishes,” but that’s not the problem — she was alive when she went to sleep with the fishes, but then she woke up dead.

This poor little fish had a hard, short life. She was okay when she first went into the tank, but then she somehow got tangled up with the anemone in the middle of the night and it almost killed her. She was never the same after that — swimming blindly into the rocks in the tank, lying motionless on the bottom, drifting in the current as if she were dead… We kept thinking she had finally died, and then she’d suddenly perk up and start swiming around as though nothing was wrong. She was a weird little fish.

Then she came down with ich. And then last night she got tangled up in one of the pumps. First she got stuck sideways across the intake, and then when I tried to pull her off she slipped out of my fingers and went head-first into the damned thing. It started spewing… stuff. I killed the power as quickly as I could, but not before I figured it had chewed up at least half of Dory — the front half, I assumed. It was a real Fargo moment.

When I took the pump out of the tank and into the kitchen to clean out what was left of Dory, I found she was intact and whole — she had gotten wedged sideways in the pump and in fact it was a snail who was getting chewed up — ground down right in half, in fact. I shook the pump to dislodge Dory so I could put her back in the tank and she fell right out … and missed my hand. Instead, she landed in the dirty stir-fry pan that was in the sink, coated with soy sauce.

I finally got her back into the tank, but she wasn’t looking too good: anemone-shocked, ichy, stuck on a pump and then nearly pureed alive, out of the water for 3 or 4 minutes, and finally soy sauced. You can perhaps understand why she just sort of drifted weakly to the bottom when I put her in.

And then the carnivorous starfish snaked out an arm, snagged her, and started to pull her under a rock, going for some impromptu sushi. This poor fish couldn’t win. I saved her from the starfish, and she finally perked up enough to swim up onto a relatively safe rock and collapse there.

And then the cleaner shrimp grabbed her. Now, he was only trying to help — they’re good for helping cure ich — but Dory was having none of it. She struggled free and found a hiding place in the back of the tank between two rocks where she was quiet and alone and relatively safe. And she lay there, hyperventilating, twitching occasionally as an emerald crab would reach up and harrass her. That’s where I left her as I turned the tank lights off. I hoped the dark and the quiet would help her recover and that she’d be back to her old anemone-addled self in the morning.

But alas, it was not to be. This morning, as I turned the tank lights on, I saw that Dory was not only dead, Dory was also breakfast. One of the crabs who’d been harrassing her was now eating her; it was holding her in one claw and digging into her guts with the other. Her eyes were missing already, so clearly he’d gone for the good stuff first.

I rescued her one final time, wrapped her up in a paper napkin, and put her in the kitchen trash. In retrospect that seems too cold and I feel like I should have flushed her down the toilet, but that isn’t much better when you think about it. Burial might have been nice but there’s no way I was going outside to dig a grave in the yard — I just wanted to make sure Zoe didn’t see her picked-apart little body. Dignity was a side consideration, getting to work on time took priority.

So Dory’s gone to that big fish tank in the sky. We’ll miss her … but we’ll also replace her. I probably wouldn’t be making such a big deal about her if it wasn’t for that pump incident. I can’t describe the horror I felt when it started spewing what I thought was Dory. I guess I feel guilty about it even if it wasn’t her.

She was a cool little fish.