The Half That You See Rebecca Rowland (smart books to read txt) 📖

is purple in color. It doesn’t run or beg or come when you call it, which is why I haven’t given it a name. It looks like it’s not doing anything, but if you wait patiently and look closely enough, you will see it doing lots of things. It waves its tube feet, located under its body like feet on a caterpillar, which gets it from one place to another. It taps and moves, and moves and taps, and eventually arrives where it wants to be. It can live a long time: up to thirty-five years, which is older than I am now. The starfish minds its own business, just as I mind my own. I see myself in it—slow and solitary. Living my own life, watching the drama of the tank around me.

Over the weekend, I noticed the first of the fish disappearing. One damselfish, then another. One angelfish, then another. Happily swimming one day, vanished the next. Over a week, each night, another fish gone, until none are left in the tank.

After much time puzzling, at last the mystery is solved. The eel, fourteen centimeters when I had first purchased it, has now the strength and size to fish for its own food. Clever thing, it would wait until night, when I was fast asleep, before it would hunt its prey, darting from between the rocks in the dark and clamping down with its strong jaws. But it made a terrible error in judgement. As the fish stock was depleted, it finally attacked the starfish. It bit off a limb, but finding the morsel too spiny to choke down, could not consume it entirely. In this way, by deduction, I realized the greedy eel had to be the culprit.

The starfish has defenses of its own. Without any interference from me, without first aid or medicine, a pearly bud has grown in the stump of the eaten limb. After six days, it has grown back another tentative limb, paler in color, and not as stout or sturdy as the remaining limbs. A skinny baby limb on a grown body, like a budding branch on an oak.

The eel has since died, starved to death after I, in revenge for it biting the starfish, stopped feeding it.

The starfish is my best friend, alone now in its tank. It looks at me sometimes as I look at it, bending a limb at a right angle, angling its tiny eye on the end of the arm. Sometimes, it bends its arm backwards in an awkward wave. Who knows what it's trying to say? I think it's singing a song à laEdith Piaf. Like me, it enjoys the classics.

If you stare at the starfish long enough, you can see it move. It takes a long time but I am dedicated and I can watch it for hours. In three hours, it spans the tank and back, creeping over the sand and rocks, moving from hiding within the waving vegetation to gluing itself to the side of the tank. Sometimes the tube feet do all the work and it looks like the starfish is performing a smooth glide. Sometimes the arms wave up and down in an unhurried, hypnotic creep.

Slowly, slowly, if you watch me patiently you can see me move. I live in starfish time.

You may think it boring to stare at a tank. I find it meditative, peaceful, a time to contemplate life. The lush vegetation sways gently, putting me in a trance. The starfish’s translucent tube feet grasp and stick to the glass. Outside my apartment, cars honk and people yell. The sirens howl and the tourists gawk.  Everything is go, go, go. Everyone is move, move, move. When is the time to just enjoy time? I want a simple life: to care for my starfish, to watch its adventures, to live my own if only in my imagination.

The more I watch the starfish, the more I realize that it looks lonely. I've watched it for six hours and all it has done is move its fattest limb and crawled only a centimeter. I've only moved to eat an old roast beef sandwich I had purchased the day before at the café and to go to the bathroom.

I imagine the starfish before it lived in my world, living its life in the briny sea, in slow moving colonies of like-minded individuals. Where is its family? Where is its Maman and Papa? Does it wonder?

I used to have Maman and Papa living here, taking care of me, eating our breakfast of brioche with a slice of ripe Bleu d'Auvergne, dressing me in a little boy’s sailor suit of navy shorts and white shirt. They spoke in soothing, tender voices, in slow, sonorous tones, and would kiss me on the forehead before going to bed. But like the starfish, I have outlived them. I haven’t seen them in a long time. I haven’t seen anybody, at least not socially, in a long time.

The starfish slowly creeps and creeps; all it can do is creep. Where is it going? Maybe it's searching for a friend, for silent, comfortable company. I understand what it’s like to be alone. I am resolved to help it, and after gathering my courage, I leave the apartment with a small goldfish bowl to the pet shop on the Rue Saint-Dominique.

Le propriétaire has a large, ruddy face, which has likely confronted many aperitifs, a bristly, welcoming moustache, and he answers my quiet bonjour with a loud, exuberant one. He speaks with a Provençaltwang, not a refined, Parisian accent. I try not to recoil as he slings an arm around my shoulders and leads me around the shop. He boasts about his variety of shrimp. He tries to tempt me with a selection of hermit crabs, even some lowly tube worms. I scoff and turn my back. I tell him I'm only here to choose a friend for my only friend. He pulls his chin and brings me to the