The Fish Tank Mangroves - Rosaleen Lynch
One of the Top 24 submissions in our 2022 Urban Tree Festival writing competition.
The Fish Tank Mangroves
The fish tank in the pet shop window has no fish. At night, every three minutes, a sign lights up to say “Watch” and a motor behind the rock starts a wave, past a piece of coral to seagrass sprouts and up a little bank to bonsai trees—the splash soaks up in their mini mangrove limbs while the spray lands on their leaves—as they rest and grow out the top of the tank. I watch from outside, until I’m asleep.
Free postcards are in a holder on the window, showing a sun-bleached cross-section of the sea the fish tank represents. “Save the Mangroves,” the postcard back says, and underneath, “Save the Man”. The pet shop’s been closed for months. The solar panel on the roof keeps the motor going, but not the fish. I watch their bodies disappear.
The animals left months ago, carried in cages, two-by-two, into an air-conditioned van. They’d no room for the fish tank, plumbed into water-pipes they tried to follow, but they connect underground like roots, the surveyor says, even though the pet shop is just a portacabin built on bricks on parking-lot asphalt. And when the light in the pet shop window goes out for good, I follow cracks in the ground along the water-pipe roots to the source of my window world, to real mangroves, real seagrass, real coral and a real deep sea, and the light comes on, and I let the waves watch over me.
Rosaleen Lynch
Rosaleen is an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London.
