Do you know that feeling when you’re a kid and you’ve been going round and round on a playground merry-go-round, hanging on with clenched fists and even your toes wrapped around its metal bars, knowing if you let your feet go your body would lift into the air in equilibrium ––– do you know that feeling when you finally jump off?

         That was how I felt at the party last Friday night ––– shot back to my childhood ––– in that moment I was telling you about. That moment where the room wouldn’t stop spinning because I couldn’t stop spinning ––– or rather, being spun, the strong hands of a dozen older members batting me, pushing me in a circle going round and round, probably with a stupid, Coors-fueled grin on my face because this was supposed to be fun, at least for everyone else. The basement room was just a blurry haze of unrecognizable faces and pricks of light stretching into thin lines across my vision as I spun wrapped in a miasma of sweat, beer, and cigarette smoke, my body crashing into other bodies, my hands knocking other hands, my feet barely keeping pace as my ankles threatened to give out.

         And then out of nowhere they stopped pushing, and for a second I kept spinning on pure momentum. The crowd ––– one amorphous throng of students ––– parted in a circle around me, and I tried to sway and catch myself even as the room kept turning. My vision bobbed, and the throbbing music was turned down by some saintly DJ as I steadied myself, exuberant to have made it through.

         But out shot a hand from the crowd with another drink. Even with the few lights shining painfully bright, the darkness of the room still hid the glass’s contents ‘til I accepted it, brought it closer to my face, lifted it, tilted it, about to drink –––

         Some guy I must’ve known threw his hand over the glass to block me.  He mouthed something I couldn’t hear, as if we were underwater, and tapped his finger on the side of the glass. Someone’s phone flashlight blinded me as it attempted to illuminate what was in it. Someone screeched. The basement filled with voices bouncing against each other, against the ceiling, the walls, and I looked through my fingers to see what it was in my glass.

         It was a goldfish. Two bug eyes on either side of its head, unblinking. Orange scales glinting in the light. Translucent fins and tail, frail as ghosts, wispy and undulating in the glass’s water. Potbellied: tiny, bulging stomach. Miniscule mouth in an O, opening, closing, trying to tell me something I couldn’t hear. The crowd must have been chanting at that point, yelling at me to drink, but I couldn’t hear them either. Their mouths opened and closed like that of the fish. Then the glass tilted for me, and I knew it was time to drink.

         Everything still spun. Someone clutched my left shoulder, another steadied my right, and all I had to do was swallow. The goldfish batted its fins uselessly as it slid with the water through my lips, a cold, slippery lump. Images of goldfish swam through my mind: our kindergarten class pet, cartoon goldfish, the crackers, my uncle’s prized fishtank, goldfish after goldfish after goldfish. The real goldfish, the goldfish of the present, glided down my throat ––– fins tickling my uvula ––– as I arrived at my final goldfish memory. Of the goldfish my friend Stan brought to school in third grade on that hot, hot day, that waited in its plastic bag until recess when we all circled up on the unmoving merry-go-round in the playground and he finally revealed it to us all: belly-up, blank eyes, fins wilted, and smelling so sharp my eyes watered. He told us he’d learned to play with it like the dog his parents wouldn’t get him, then showed us how he’d do it: twisted open the bag, extracted the fish by its tail, took hold of its fins, and danced it around like a puppet. He stretched the fish’s body too far and tore it. It fell into his lap, fins still pinched between his fingertips. Someone screeched. We flushed it down a school toilet and watched as the water did what the fish couldn’t, watched the fish swim round and round…

         Just like the room now spinning, the image of the dead fish imprinted on the dizzy scene, and just like all the goldfish of my memory had come to mind, the fish I’d swallowed couldn’t help but surface, too, in a wave of acid, pizza, beer; its little orange body shot out like a fireball, all onto the grimy basement floor with its cigarette butts and gum wrappers, sick to my stomach, but as the crowd cheered for me, I realized I’d reached that point in the merry-go-round where you jump off, stumble, tumble to the ground, flat on your back, heart running a marathon, and all you want to do is go again. This was supposed to be fun.