The Fish Tank Hours
by Patrick Roland
Grandpap worked the mines since he was a teenager.
Every breath, rough, raspy—black lung, they called it.
I imagined coal scraping his insides,
a fire, slow-burning, lit generations ago.
We sat in silence on the sunporch,
his oxygen tank whispering verse.
We watched the fish tank,
Bright bodies glided like embers,
as if healing could be borrowed
from their endless, measured circles.
The fish were our words.
I once told him I liked the
pirate ship best, the way it wobbled with bubbles.
He told me he wished he was a fish
so his lungs could turn fluid into air.
Grandma said the fish were good for his heart.
I never understood how fish
could fix a heart, or lungs.
Dad mined too. Different shafts, same darkness.
He hated the sunporch.
He went fishing, often alone.
The one time I tagged along,
I heard him talking,
to the fish, to God.
A prayer rippling the surface.
Hospitals became my rivers.
Another surgery.
Tubes snaking across a bed.
In the ICU Grandpap looked more machine than man,
a shell wired to a dozen devices.
I wanted to tell him about the fish I caught with Dad,
if only he could stand on the shore.
But we never fished together.
We sat in silence.
Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator living with cystic fibrosis. His work has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize as well as for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. His writing appears in Rattle, South Florida Poetry Journal, HAD, Sky Island, A-minor, and elsewhere. He lives near Pittsburgh with his wife and children. Website: patrickgroland.com / Twitter: pg_roland
