The Mosquitofishers

“Well, June, why won’t you get a job? We can use the money, we’re going to lose the house in 9 months. I’m tired of trying to homeschool you, and you don’t seem to want to put in the extra effort to get in college. Something to show commitment beyond GED level might do it.”

“Mom, I want to, but only Burgerbulge is hiring. You know I would get that Marshmallow Disease.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the soft soft white fat that people that work in fast food places get. They get to eat there for free, and the fat is different from normal fat.”

“It is not!”

“Yes, you go look at them. The fat creeps evenly all over every part of their body, and their chins, their fingers, everything is so soft like a marshmallow. Normal fat people have potbellies or fat in one place mostly. Imagine what I would look like, and if you kissed me it would dent.”

“June Fisher, you’ve always been very stubborn, I’m sure you wouldn’t eat too much of that stuff if you decided not to.”

“But you don’t have to eat it Mom, it just ABSORBS in! –”

“Ok, Ok, don’t get a job then. Go to the community service center, find something that will look good on your applications. A day a week at the animal shelter is fine but you need to do something else, that will help people. Your brother too, he only behaves when you are around. You’ve got to keep him from getting into any more trouble while I’m at work.”

That’s how I got a great job! Only, people started calling me and my brother the Mosquitofishers.

Not only was it independent with NO BOSS, my little brother could come along for his tons of hours of mandated community service, and I GOT PAID! For the most ridiculous thing: putting mosquitofish in the stagnant green swimming pools of foreclosed abandoned houses. Like our house was going to be, soon. West Nile Virus is spread by mosquitoes. Global Warming people like my brother Barnes Fisher say that Dengue fever and malaria will be coming too. So we’re saving people, we're being good college material, AND we’ll be the Mother Teresas of Malaria. Mom is very happy. Although she thought at first we made it up.

“Nonsense, you just want to roam around on your skateboards. There is no such job!”

Then she called the supervisor for the community resource center. Not much better.

“Yes, you’ll be wandering into through people’s yards, and some Neighborhood Watch person will call the cops. You’re Hard of Hearing, June, you won’t hear the police yelling at you, and you’ll get shot. And what if there’s homeless people sneaking around? You could get attacked.”

“No, Mom, I’ll wear my hearing aids I promise, and all these houses are foreclosed, so there’s hardly any neighbors anyway! And the town went bankrupt so there’s not many police anymore, you said so! The homeless are all downtown begging, not in the suburbs.”

“Your arguments are ridiculous, you’d never make it as a lawyer. No.”

But finally she thought it would be ok if we took our Pittweiller along to protect us, and she was impressed when we showed her our official dayglo green and blue vests with MOSQUITO ABATEMENT PATROL in reflective writing on the backs.

“Don’t let Momzilla swim in those pools, she’ll get an ear infection, we can’t afford the vet now. But slosh water on her if she gets hot. You have to do this job in the mornings and early in the evening so she stays cool. And your cell phones, DON’T DROP THEM IN THE POOLS. Text me every hour.”

So Momzilla towed us on our skateboards to the center, we picked up our baggies of mosquitofish in insulated backpacks to keep them at the right temperature. We had a zone to cover, a list of addresses, like an old fashioned paper route. About a third of the houses here are foreclosed, so we didn’t have to go miles or anything. Pools, hot tubs, planters, anything with water, those are the tough environments the tiny brownish mosquitofish can live in.

Momzilla loved pulling us, she is so ripped naturally. She’s over having her pups and she’s spayed now. There were her 15 newborn pups with her at the shelter, ten lived, and our family fostered them till “Pity The Pits” found them homes. It was easy to get them adopted, because they had some kind of fuzzy dad and so PTP put them on the web site as Labradoodles instead of Pittadoodles. PTP got $200- each and saved a bunch of real Pits with the money. The way they see it, if it saves an animal’s life, it’s ok to lie as much as you want.

But Momzilla, she was not really saveable, her time ran out and even PTP couldn’t find her a home. Big black dogs are the least adoptable because they look scary and people can’t see their expressions. Momzilla’s saggy breasts shrank up, but she has huge black nips like giant peanuts, permanently, and someone had cropped her ears in a raggedy way. She barked at people she didn’t know, so she failed the temperament tests. We kept her, we love her, and the secret is, she stops barking and is sweet if you say the person is “FRIENDLLLLY FRIENDS” in a silly voice to her.

It was spooky, going into those back yards. Some were trashed and things broken- the owners had been so mad at the bank taking their house, they wrecked it. Someone even chopped down a tree into the pool. Others looked like the people planned to come back, there were barbeques and lawnmowers and bikes and toys.

One yard looked green and perfect; the old man next door yelled at us to get out. We told him we were with mosquito control, and then he was ok. He had been mowing the foreclosed lawn and watering some of the fruit trees. But he said he couldn’t use his water anymore, it was drought rationing and now he only had enough for his own yard. The pool was almost full, mostly of sheets and strings of algae.

“Why can’t you take the pool water to water stuff with?”

“Good idea, but empty pools crack and then the house is worth even less.”

“Why can’t the bank keep the pools nice then?”

“Costs too much. They won’t even pay for someone to keep the bushes and grass cut, so the house ends up looking unsaleable anyway. Then MY house looks unsaleable too, being next door. What’s the difference, that house was built crappy, it’s starting to fall apart anyhow. These crummy developments, I got ripped off BIGTIME and I’m staying on account of I have nowhere to move to anyhow.”

“We’re moving. But we have 9 months legally to stay and save for a rental. The bank sends mean letters but we won’t pay the mortgage anymore so it’s like free.”

“Good luck with the fish. Hey, can you eat them, how big do they grow?”

“Ha, they only grow an inch long, they’re a kind of little guppy that breeds really fast, Mister.”

“Yumm, I might come over and scoop up a couple hundred for a pan fry sometime.”

“Nooo, not our pet fishes, we already named them and everything!!!”

We were just joking around, but we already felt protective of them, and we were now the Johnny Appleseeds of Mosquitofishization. In one day we had converted ten pools, seven hot tubs, and everything else with water standing in it, into fish habitats.

At the end of the day, we took in our checked-off lists to the Center.

“You do ok?”

“We love it! The fish swam off right away and they loved it too!”

“Don’t you go stealing anything, even if nobody wants it, you have to leave everything like you found it.”

“Right, like a National Park.”

“Well…oh yeah, ha ha… see you tomorrow.”