Our finned friend

I adopted a fish for a day. Let me begin by explaining that I am not an animal person. It is not that I don't like them, mine is an attitude of complete indifference. I never get attached. So, last week I was cleaning an apartment (I clean the apartments in our complex when people move out). I won't go into the disgusting sty that was this apartment but let me just say that what normally takes two hours has stretched into at least eight over the course of the week. The former tenant left a lot of their junk in the apartment which I had the privilege of hauling out to the dumpster. As I was cleaning up the kitchen I came across a cup with a fish. Assuming the fish was dead I went to send it down to a watery grave. However, as I stood poised over the toilet bowl that darn thing started to swim around. Of course, I couldn't just kill it. So I finished cleaning the apartment and left it there on the counter hoping that the landlord would have the nerve to flush it himself. That was last week, when I went back yesterday to finish things up that silly fish was still on the counter and what's worse, it wasn't dead! If I was a swearing person I might have let slip a profanity or two, instead I picked up that incorrigible fish and took it home. We named him Gilbert, "Gil" for short and he lived happily in a mason jar on my counter for at least twenty-four hours at which time my mom and little sister came down for a visit. My sister, being the kind-hearted individual that she is, did not balk once as I impishly pawned the fish off into her care. (I think she feared for Gil's wellbeing under my not-so watchful eye). So, Gilbert was renamed Constantine and he and the mason jar have moved to Riverton. Sorry mom.