Catching a Guppy with a Slotted Spoon
landin eldridge *
landin eldridge *
Landin Eldridge, Don’t Beat a Dead Horse (Detail 3), mixed media drawing, MFA Thesis exhibition at Ewing Gallery.
My first class pet was a chunky red-brown guinea pig. It belonged to the other third grade teacher, which meant that our class only got visitation rights weekly on Thursdays right after the hell of learning multiplication tables. My most beloved class pet was a tiny guppy, one of thirty or so that we studied for a science experiment. And my final class pet(s) only halfway counted as class pets because most of their time was spent as boring little eggs in a boring little DIY desk-lamp-lit incubator. The ten chicks sat tucked away in the back corner by the discipline chart, visited most frequently by a kid who liked to bite his erasers into little pieces.
Everyone avoided the eraser-chomper at lunch ‘cause he’d eat his stale pink-gray cafeteria hotdog with canned peaches on top. But during this era of class pets, he earned a brief moment of popularity from his knowledge of guinea pigs. He knew their scientific name, Cavia Porcellus. He knew their teeth never stopped growing and that’s why they always needed little sticks to chew on. He knew to always hold them with two hands, one to keep them from running forward and one to keep them from wriggling backward. He told us not to squeeze hard with either hand because they have fragile bones. I remember thinking of the owl pellets they made us dissect in science class (fuzzy gray masses of dirt and hair filled with mouse bones we had to pick out like the little fossil kits at Five Below). When I dug through a pellet with Polly Pocket-sized utensils and toes gripping the insides of my before-they-were-cool Crocs, I eventually exposed a delicate pearly-white ribcage. I excused myself to cry in the bathroom stall with the most toilet paper. I couldn’t help but imagine the little ribcages inside of the other class’s guinea pigs, how badly I didn’t want them to get eaten by owls and sent away to be used in a McGraw Hill science kit. This isn’t the only reason I chose to sit on the ratty overstuffed couch in Mrs. D’s room instead of holding the guinea pigs on our visits. Peach Hotdog Kid also told a group of us on the playground, held in rapt attention in the mulch under the slide, that guinea pigs have nothing in their brains to tell them to stop eating. They just don’t know when to stop. With a glint in his eye that reminded me of a magnifying glass using the sun to set ants on fire he said, “So if you give a guinea pig a whole head of lettuce, it’ll eat and eat and eat and eat until it blows up. It happened to my cousin once.”
As the only one who seemed concerned with the ticking time bomb of a guinea pig’s eating habits, it was my self-assigned duty to act as guard. I sat on the ratty overstuffed couch in Mrs. D’s room, absently picking at the well-worn checkered cover on the arm and watching everyone pass the guinea pigs around. It was impossible to stop picturing myself wiping guts from my little pink glasses, picking up pieces of partially digested lettuce from the carpet with latex allergy-friendly gloves, or finding stray tortoiseshell guinea pig hairs in my school supplies for years to come if they burst. I reserved an aggressive amount of potential energy in the event I needed to spring forward if I saw anyone not using two hands or squeezing their little bones too hard or trying to sneak in a couple Cheez-Its from their pockets. If these guinea pigs exploded, I thought, it would be all my fault.
I can’t quite remember if the chicks came before or after the guinea pigs, mostly because my rural education seemed like an endless stream of secret and not-secret baby birds on school grounds. Boys came to school with ducklings from the local Tractor Supply in their hoodie pockets and chicks tucked into a folded pouch created by lifting up the edge of a Simply Southern t-shirt. They’d stroll in late to French, coughing surreptitiously to cover the faint “peep peep peep” coming from somewhere inside their shirtsleeves. I was always surprised by the gentleness used when bringing the chicks out in cupped hands for us to hold in the parking lot beside their muddy trucks. I’d seen a picture of each boy proudly holding a bloodied turkey upside down by the legs, bearded father in camo holding a rifle shyly in the background. It was a sort of dissonance they never acknowledged.
One day in particular, a boy (who I knew because he had kissed my best friend in the eighth grade at a birthday party where I was sitting in the garage wearing my knock-off Hollister), came in with a set of chicks that weren’t meant for the usual parking lot showcase. Loverboy had bought them for his little sister who was about seven or eight, a fact that garnered a chorus of Awwwws from a group of girls in our class. In reality, purchasing the downy yellow chicks was an admission of guilt and an act of obligation.
I sat on the floor outside the art room fifteen minutes before classes began for the day and overheard Loverboy bragging to his friends about his drive to school that morning. He and his sister were winding along the wooded backroads near their house when she spotted a group of geese mid-cross about a half mile up. She gently told him to slow down the first time, then another time, then ten more consecutive times with increasing intensity until her begging became a full-on wail.
According to Loverboy, she cried “like a little bitch” the rest of the way to school after he sped up to hit as many geese as he could at one time. His mom would be pissed if he didn’t buy some new birds to make it up to her, he said.
After basketball practice, I crouch-walked around the front of his truck to inspect the grill for bird feathers. All I saw was the warped reflection of my ugly purple practice jersey and a few crusty horseflies.
Really, I don’t remember that much about our classroom pet chicks that were also from the local Tractor Supply store. In the beginning, I believed their life to be warm and glowy, intrinsically linked to the small lamp hung above their plexiglass container. Everyone was respectful in letting them rest, I thought. We all said goodbye to them on the way out of the classroom for the day and I would include them in my prayers at night. The first one hatched near spring break, and we all believed it wouldn’t be long until he was successful in waking up his brothers and sisters. The next four or five hatched in quick succession, making it difficult to concentrate during silent reading time and impossible to sleep during 15-minute nap time. Number seven took a little bit longer, which the teacher assured us was very normal. I found comfort in this because it matched what my mom said about how my sister was in her tummy for a shorter amount of time than I was (I thought that’s why she had red hair and I didn’t).
The last three eggs took forever to hatch. Every free moment in class one of us squished our face against the glass, using snot and tears and sweat and fogged breath to show the unhatched pets how worried we were about them. In my prayers, I begged God to let them hatch right away, to let me go in the next day and see all ten, to let them just be taking their time. Eventually, the teacher told us that sometimes eggs just don’t hatch.
It felt like the guinea pigs had exploded, like it was all my fault, like I should have prayed harder. I had hit the geese with my truck.
In many ways, I could have lived without the to-go box science experiments that showed up at our classroom door in October of the next year. We received cardboard crates with large holes and lots of bubble wrap that contained almost thirty guppies the size of deflated water balloons. They had huge eyes that popped out of their heads like those squish toys from the dollar store and their tiny bodies had paper-thin skin and gills that let us see each organ like an x-ray. I can’t quite recall the nature of the experiment—something about testing the growth of each baby guppy depending on the pH of their water. (I only think this is true because one of my classmates joked about putting her group of guppies in a bowl of CapriSun Roarin’ Waters. I was horrified.)
After the month-long series of gentle tests and semi-accurate measurements, we were each allowed to take a guppy home with us as a personal pet. My mom and I went to Walmart to pick out the most sensibly-priced glass bowl, a bag of rainbow pebbles, and a little ceramic boot filled with plastic seaweed. I filled the bowl with water, tested the pH with meticulous attention, waited for it to become an appropriate temperature, and then transferred my first-ever pet into his new home. He seemed reasonably happy when I looked into his glassy fish eyes (I could only see one at one time because of their relative size to the rest of his fish body). I imagined we were in agreement about how nice it was that we weren’t obligated to the normal pet-owner relationship, with fur everywhere and apologizing whenever the pet jumps on a stranger and sleeping with a tail forever up my nose. I only had to touch Guppy one time, but I sometimes see this moment behind my eyelids as I’m trying to fall asleep.
There was a day that I noticed that Guppy’s tank had become the brown-green color of a pond surface. I knew that I needed to change the water, which required taking Guppy out of his home and plopping him down in a secondary location. I was home alone briefly while my parents bought more mini bottles of diet coke from food lion, so I took it upon myself to do some cleaning. (“Helping out for once, are we?” my mom might say.) I got a small cup with a faded Disney World logo of warm water and a large silver slotted spoon. My thought process was that I would be able to scoop up Guppy with the slotted spoon without taking any of his dirty water with him.
On the surface of my cracked white dresser, I set up the transfer station. I lured Guppy to the surface of the water with a few fish flakes and scooped him quickly into the spoon before he went back down to his boot. Midway to his temporary cup, Guppy slipped through one of the holes in the slotted spoon and onto the floor. I screamed aloud, dropping to my knees to save Guppy from the matted shag carpet of my bedroom floor. I got him up with the spoon, only to have him slip away again to a different part of the floor. Through his translucent skin, I could see the effort his fish organs were putting forth to keep him alive through my mistake, through something that was actually my fault. I had to break my agreement, gently but urgently picking him up with my chubby kid fingers and putting him into a cupped palm until my hand found the water. He laid still for a moment on the surface and I thought for sure he was dead.
After “catching his breath” it seems, he slowly made circles up and down the interior of the cup. I dumped the dirty water from his tank, hand-scooped fresh rainbow pebbles into its bottom, wiped the boot down with a clean rag, and returned Guppy to his home. I pet the side of his tank and fogged the glass with hot breath begging forgiveness. He lived for another two years after that but I know he never forgave me. If our roles were reversed, I bet he would have left me to flop around on the carpet until I ran out of air. ☸
Images from Landin Eldridge’s MFA thesis exhibition at the Ewing Gallery.
Landin Eldridge was born and raised in Siler City, a rural North Carolina town. She received her BA in Studio Art and Theatre at Davidson College in 2021. While at Davidson, she dipped her toes in all areas of art, participating in multiple theatrical productions (as both a designer and an actor) and singing groups, as well as working in an on-campus organization that helped provide grants for various artistic ventures. She received her MFA from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2024. At Gallery 1010, she has served as Gallery Director, with exhibitions entitled “Baby Show: A Show of Babies” and “Gator: Drawings and Digital Cannibalism.”
In her studio practice, Landin explores concepts of intimacy, embarrassment, memory, fear, and relationship through the use of humor. Her MFA show, “Prove It: An Installation of Drawings” serves as a visual index to this short story and personal essay. The experiences described are deeply influenced by her upbringing in rural North Carolina, as well as her childhood spent with undiagnosed OCD.
Stay up to date with Landin on her Instagram: @landin.jpeg.