You know the part of the Christmas story that everybody loves to hate, and nobody ever, ever wants to get stuck playing during the skit the church puts on? It’s that innkeeper. The one that doesn’t take in the super-pregnant mom and her tired donkey and her grubby carpenter husband.

But you know, I kind of understand him.

When a half-frozen pathetic lifeform shows up on your doorstep, and you’re just busy, okay? You’re busy and it’s got one foot in the grave; you look into its eyes, and you don’t see peace on earth or goodwill towards men. You see a mess to clean up. And maybe since he didn’t get the angel chorus poking him in the right direction, or even a dumb bird like a dove spared to show up miraculously at the right moment, something on your doorstep one day is…

It’s like a frozen goldfish on your car windshield.

My brother, Bennett, walked out of hockey practice this winter, and found the skinny fish floating amongst ice crystals in a plastic bag tied to his windshield.

I mean, no one prepares you for getting out of hockey practice to find a half-frozen goldfish on your windshield—besides the fact that for some reason there’s a longstanding hockey tradition of tossing sea life at players who perform especially well—so he took it back inside the locker room and held the fish up to his teammates. Nobody knows where it came from.

“This fish was on my car,” my brother said.

Then the fish was on his locker room bench. Then on his passenger seat. Then in my hands.

It sort of floated side to side, a dazed look in its eyes.

“I don’t even know who put it on my car,” my brother said. “Do we just let it die? It’s like, already half-dead.”

Half-frozen with no bird or angel declaring it as special and life-changing or even still alive.

But then my feet were already moving into our storage closet, looking for the old fish bowl that we used when I was a second grader, taking home fish from Family Fun Night at school. It was dusty, but there were still aquarium rocks and a net stashed inside.

“I asked my team what I should name it,” Bennett said, as we cleaned the bowl and filled it with water. “Nobody really cared except for Ruker.”

“Then what’d Ruker say to name it?”

“Ruker.”

Ruker sat at the bottom of the bowl and stared at nothing, probably still unthawing. Or reassessing his will to continue to live.

My dad bought Ruker delicious fish food (from the dawning of time, no one has ever referred to fish food as delicious and meant it. And I think Ruker knew that too, because for the first few days he barely ate.) My sister and her fiancé bought an aerator volcano and two friends for Ruker.

But both of Ruker’s pet store friends died within the week. And somehow, it was my job to send them into the fishy afterlife.

I almost cried. But I didn’t, because if you’re an adult and you cry while burying goldfish you’ve known for less than a week, you just have to have some elaborate cover story about why your eyes are red and puffy that has nothing to do with said goldfish or risk having to bury yourself with them for a bit until your embarrassment clears up.

And then there was Ruker.

Who had decided after much deliberation he was going stick around.

I say it every morning when I come down to feed him. “Oh look, you’re still alive!”

There’s a part of every episode of Sesame Street’s “Elmo’s World” where Elmo will stop and learn something from his goldfish, Dorothy. Every morning I look at his two bulging eyes, and I think about how goldfish have been shown to have a memory that can last at least three months. So he remembers the prank, and the hectic locker room visit, and the drive home, and our mistakes at setting up the bowl, and his dead friends, and maybe even me. He just adapted and adapted and adapted.

But at least now he’s here where its warm. Because my brother was cast in that age-old skit about a tired guy that gets a surprise on his doorstep—or windshield—and has to make a split-second decision. And he chose to stray from the “no room” script. Ol’ Ruker can rest his weary soul with us for as long as he decides to stay.

“Ruker asked about Ruker today,” Bennett said after coming back from a practice a few weeks back.

“Yeah?” I said. “That was nice of him.”

“They want Ruker back in the locker room as a mascot.”

Gabrielle Eisma

Gabrielle Eisma graduated Calvin with a BFA in studio art and writing in 2022. She’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she now works as a writer and illustrator for books for (mostly) children and middle grade readers.