Miami Daltry
The story of one man's quest for his porpoise
Sometime in the next few days, he thought, he might just see Ms. Bubbles again.
Ms. Bubbles was his favorite of the bunch. She always seemed to be smiling and he knew her heart was full of gold. She always brought him the flowers like he asked. She always seemed to be in a good mood, chirping like a canary and squeeling in glee like a child on a tire swing.
But Miami Daltry hadn't seen Ms. Bubbles in awhile. As part of some stupid animal rights campaign, he (and his beloved aquarium) had been forced to let her go. She was gone. She disappeared under and swam off. Daltry knew she would enjoy her freedom, but he also knew something much worse: she was raised around humans, all she had ever known was humans, they were her survival.
Nightmarish thoughts of a waif-thin Ms. Bubbles circled his mind for the first few days. He would come into the now empty aquarium and find his thoughts directed only at the coastline outside. His eyes would take in the vastness of the world outside; his heart would only take in both the complexity of the world and the loss of someone so directly influential in his life. Ms. Bubbles was his baby - he had raised her from birth.
Days passed and Miami grew more despondent. He began having visions of the apocalypse with pure, unadulterated porpoise carnage overtaking the countryside - body after body, beak after beak, Ms. Bubbles after Ms. Bubbles. Ms. BUBBLES! There had still been no sign of Ms. Bubbles since she disappeared under the waves in Loading Bay.
Finding his thoughts to be only negative and abhorrent, Daltry decided to do something proactive: he quit his job at the aquarium, the job he had aimed for since he was a little 10-year-old watching nature specials on television.
"Miami!" His mom was mad now. He had released an injured baby raccoon in the house as a means of saving it from the hovering hawk outside. Sure, little Miami Daltry knew his mom would be angry, but he'd much rather have an angry mom than to deal with than to watch as a monsterous bird of prey overcame a helpless (and undeniably cute) animal.
"Miami! Get this thing out of the kitchen right now!" He couldn't do it 'right now' though. He was busy shooting fireworks into the air to scare off the hawk. He was screaming too. The neighbors already thought he was crazy, now they'd surely think he was dangerous too. If he was shooting fireworks now, when would he shift to dynamite? Fireworks, after all, were a gateway explosive.
Miami's mother came out of the house with a trash bag, looked at her idiot son with a ruffle of anger and twinge of curiosity and dropped the bag unceremoniously into one of the three trash cans lined up along the back side of their house. Miami didn't know it then, but his mother was much more dangerous than the hawk: he had seen the last of the raccoon.