The last thing we had to do before being officially moved out of the apartment was to move our aquarium. Moving an aquarium is never a pleasant task. We have a 29 gallon tank, and to move it we have to empty it down to about an inch of water with the fish still in it. Its still weighs about 100 pounds at that point, but its manageable. There's one thing that makes moving the aquarium a little bit more tricky than normal. I have this elusive little catfish that is now on his third aquarium. He outlives everyone. The problem with this guy is that he basically spends all day hiding in a log and only comes out at night or in the early morning. I go for months without seeing him. But I assume that if he died he would finally float to the surface so I don't really worry about him. So when I go to empty the tank, I pull his log out very slowly, jostle it a bit in the hopes that he'll swim out. He doesn't. I pull the log a little farther out and still nothing. there is no flapping or flopping in the part of the log that's out of the water. I figure he must have swam for cover and I just missed it, so I take the whole log out and look into all the cracks and crevices and listen for any signs of struggle and nothing. So I put the now air exposed log in the sink and do a visual inspection for the catfish. He's nowhere to be seen. I have seen him move quite a bit of aquarium rock so I start sifting the rocks with my hand to make sure he's still among the living. Believe me when I say, I sifted every inch of that aquarium and there was no fish to be found below the surface. I do a cursory search of the floor around the aquarium to make sure he hasn't pulled a Nemo and is heading for the nearest drain. Still nothing. At this point I'm resigned to the fact that Lauri's son of a bitch cannibal Angel fish devoured my 10 year old catfish like every other fish we try to put in there. Usually we find the skeleton, but Lauri had just changed the filter so I figured the bones got sucked in. Or that son of a bitch couldn't help himself and ate the bones too.
When Lauri showed up to help me, I gave her both the news and a strong admonition about that god damn cannibal fish killing the old wise man of the aquarium. Lauri however refused to believe that the cat fish could just disappear with out any physical evidence being left behind. She needed to see the body. So she went to the log, now in the sink and practically dry and inspected the nooks and crannies just like I had. We even ran it under the tap to try and flush him out on the off chance we couldn't see him. No luck. Lauri resigned herself...sort of.
Anyway, we took our time after that, taking apart all the equipment, gathering up random stuff from around the apartment and loading the aquarium accessories into the back of my truck. We drove to the house got everything set up. no sign of said catfish. End of story.
Until...
Lauri comes running into the bedroom this morning as I'm getting ready for work and says, "your catfish is alive and he's out eating" I couldn't believe it but there he was.
There is only one explanation for this. I sifted through every pebble of that aquarium and that log was out of the water for at least 45 minutes.
I once knew a fish that survived a double flushing, an impaling by a kebab skewer, and 3 months under the kitchen sink with no food in a tupperware bowl. The same fish went on to decimate my aquarium when I brought him home from Tim's.
But I cannot conceive of my catfish or any other fish surviving out of water for that long.
Here is the only explanation I can think of. My fish was raised from the dead in some voodoo ritual and is in fact undead. A Zombie. A Zombie Fish.
