Two weeks after the ordeal with the goldfish—choosing the exact pair the kids wanted and netting them among their school at the shopping center’s Petco, and bagging and buying them and bringing them home, and letting the water sit, then naming them and pouring them into this world we’d made, then burying one (Fiona) in the yard, with full ceremony, and replacing her (Fiona II), and choosing the glittery blue rocks to amuse them so that their lives wouldn’t only be about circling the tiny bowl on our dining room table but circling the tiny bowl looking at something beautiful—that’s when the kids give them up.

* * *

Playing God or mother (giver of food and light, maker of beauty) has dulled. And so the fish, like orange flames, drift unnoticed within the contours of their sphere. When I think of it, I pinch flakes into their bowl. While over the crest of hills, smoke wafts toward us, and opening the door of our own glassed enclosure brings the smell of campfire, which is the burning of houses, hotels, and suburban trees fifty miles north. It’s an old story, a fable we’re learning to tell: another fall, another fire. Monitor the air quality sites. Switch on the purifiers, fill the bottles with water. Leave the inhaler by the bed. Pray to the gods of wind. Our bags are packed, though we know this isn’t our fire. But the fire that comes for us may first send its white ash to cover our lawn like a veil, or may wake us with its hot rasp already at our necks.

* * *

I think how the fire will take them—the roar that will fill the rooms we humans have surrendered and burst this little globe in an explosion of sparks.

How relentless the holiness, the cataclysms—

* * *

The goldfish may actually have a memory, contrary to previous belief, but the science suggests it’s cinematic, and at most two seconds in length, like a slideshow:

          glint of dyed ultramarine pebbles // light
                              bending through convex glass // 
                  flash of tail // jostle of waves

as a blurred figure bumps the table, skipping past.

From Smother: Poems by Rachel Richardson. Copyright © 2025 by Rachel Richardson. Published by W.W. Norton. Reprinted by permission of the author and W.W. Norton.