How Brian Came To Be Monocular

I'm not good at keeping fish alive. My brief attempt to become a Fish Owner in my first year at University sadly ended after only a few weeks with the flushing of Doctor Honeydew and the sub-geranium burial of Beaker soon after.

But my Crazy Sister is good at keeping fish. She always keeps a few tanks of goldfish and Black Moors who usually enjoy long healthy lives. I suspect that this is because she knows much more about keeping fish than I do, using plants and snails to maintain underwater eco-systems and finding time for the essential fish-keeping tasks like changing the water.

The most remarkable fish she ever kept was a Black Moor with long flowing fins and goggly protruding eyes called Brian (naming your five fish after the Backstreet Boys is grounds for being called "Crazy", in my opinion.) His early life was unremarkable but an event soon occurred which set him apart from the other Backstreet Boys. That event was The Great Siphoning Accident.

One day, my Crazy Sister decided to clean the tank and replace the water. Her first task was to siphon most of the old water out. I suppose that if I'd changed fishtank water many times in my life, I would have cut corners too. This day, she decided not to remove the fish during the siphoning process but instead to keep a close eye on them as she held the siphon while the water drained out.

But boring tasks are daydreaming tasks and as she mentally floated away for a moment, Brian swam too close to the siphon. Crazy Sister felt a gentle "thoonk" in the tube and looked down to see a black fish eye zipping through the siphoning tube with blood vessels streaming behind it. A quick check of the tank revealed Brian calmly swimming away with similar blood vessels trailing from where one of his goggly eyes used to be.

Now Black Moors characteristically have poor vision to begin with and Brian's certain visual handicap along with the severity of his siphoning injury indicted that perhaps his rapid re-classification from binocular to monocular would end in his ultimate flushing. But the strangest things can happen in the animal world, and to our collective amazement, Brian made a full recovery and later rejoined his band members in the clean tank. (I like to imagine they went on to write a hit single called "Black Moor's Back: Larger Than Life, but a little Incomplete.")

Brian lived for years after The Great Siphoning Accident, even outlasting his fellow Backstreet Boys. He became a large, fat, one-eyed aristocrat of a fish who always swam ten-degrees off vertical and who permanently wore a glum (if somewhat startled) expression.

And perhaps the greatest irony is that although The Great Siphoning Accident is folklore in our family and we will remember it for generations to come, Brian forgot it three seconds after it occurred.