For more than a year and a half, my betta fish had given me companionship, joy and the opportunity to call a living creature “Bootsy.” But lately he hadn’t been up to his lovable fish antics, and he was having trouble swimming upward too. The fish guide recommended I stop feeding him freeze-dried bloodworms, which look like tiny pork rinds and are, supposedly, just as nutritionally dubious. I cut them from his diet, but still he lingered morosely at the bottom of the tank. At feeding time, he would vault awkwardly up toward the spot where his food pellets floated, his trajectory as wobbly as a weak bottle rocket, only to miss the food and fall down sadly.

So instead of sprinkling the food on top of the water, I had taken to snapping my wrist and pelting it hard enough to sink it toward him.

“You look like you’re trying to knock him unconscious,” my boyfriend observed.

When this feeding technique failed, I tried minimizing the distance between my fish and the top of the tank. Which is to say, I let the water get really low. Bootsy dwelled glumly in his freshwater crawlspace.

“He likes it that way,” I insisted.

“He’s going to die soon, isn’t he?” my friends would say.

“Do you think so?” I’d ask, hoping one of them was secretly a marine biologist. Nobody was, of course.