The Loach

Of course none of you wanted to read about my spitting up something that looked like a blackened, sundried frog carcass. My friend Janet, however, is not like you. She was fascinated by the topic. What could it have been? she wondered. Maybe a piece of Black Bart gum from when I was a child? Or perhaps a loach?

I hadn't thought about Black Bart in years, and I'd never heard of a loach. Janet explained:

When I was a bad little girl in grade nine biology class I sat near the back (of course) next to this boggy looking fish tank. For weeks, I peered into it trying to see any sign of life. Finally, my efforts paid off when I noticed something really creepy swimming along the bottom in the murk. I told my lab partner and her and I became obsessed with this creature. Well, to be honest, we became obsessed to kill it. It looked like a piece of poo. So we started feeding it things which it ate. It started off innocently enough with old bits of gum, erasers, carbon tips from pencils. When we noticed that it ate them and really had no effect we took it up a notch and started feeding it various plastics and metals and there may have been even a chess piece.

One day the loach didn't move. It was dead.

A day or so later my dad comes home from school (he was a physics and biology teacher at my school) and he seemed really upset. He told me that the loach was dead, someone had been feeding it inappropriate things. Well, I put two and two together. If I had only known that it was my dad's favourite creature in the science department.