"The Fishless Cycle" by E.P. Tuazon / Reed Magazine (part 2 of 2)
- Short Story Shoutout
- May 20
- 4 min read
"That was the condition: If the water was okay. Everything depended on that."
Have you read David Foster Wallace’s 2005 college commencement address “This is Water”?
It’s a great reflection on modern life and the necessity of keeping the idea of the mundanity of existence at the center of our consciousness if we are to live compassionately. Foster Wallace uses the idea of a fish not being able to recognize the enormity of the presence of water in its life as a stand-in for the fact that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
E.P. Tuazon has brought Foster Wallace’s thinking to full, vibrant life in the exquisite “The Fishless Cycle” (4,150 words) in Reed Magazine’s latest issue. The stakes in this short story seem to be low, but as things progress they start to feel enormous, a testament to Tuazon’s skill in defining characters. By focusing on very small specifics and beautifully framed emotions, we quickly care deeply for the small cast assembled here.
“The Fishless Cycle” tells the story of a boy who is fixated on the idea of setting up a home aquarium. The narrator is the boy’s mom. We meet the dad, an overworked cop who floats in and out of frame occasionally, always in uniform and always exhausted. And finally a young woman who clerks at a pet supply shop. That’s it. We get no names—a bold choice and a correct one. The story is somehow more intimate for remaining universal; mom, dad, son.
While the son is the focal point of the story, the mom provides the perfect point-of-view. Her entire existence is devoted to caring for others (at home with her family, at work at a nursing home), and we see that care dispensed in tiny increments throughout the story. But who will care for her? Her longing for it is palpable. We can feel it in the space between the mom and her always-nodding-off husband, in the growing distance between her and her son as he learns to navigate the world on his own through his obsession with the aquarium.
“I watched him for a moment from the kitchen,” the mom says as the boy begins to assemble his tank. “Just long enough to feel the ache of it—how easily he disappeared into his own world, how gently he left mine.”
When that longing is addressed near the story’s close, in the smallest and most mundane way possible, because Tuazon has set up the situation so ably, it explodes on the page like an atomic bomb.
In working to set up the aquarium, the son’s insistence on “getting the water right” is integral to the plot of the story, but it’s also it’s clearest expression of its theme. References are made to “invisible poisons in the tap water,” to the boy “testing the water, checking the filter, adjusting the heater dial with quiet precision.” Will things with the fish work out? They will “if the water is okay.”
The water that the entire story floats in is not okay. The pet store clerk, a woman who “couldn’t be older than twenty,” has a “small skeleton tattoo on her wrist that she kept brushing her sleeve over.” A reminder of some personal tragedy? “Each time [the tattoo] showed, it looked like it was kicking its way out.” These things loom large in our lives.
When the husband is home and half-asleep after the rigors of his long day, the sound of the chatter on his police radio is reliably there in the background; a world of danger and aggression piped in to the couple’s quiet bedroom. That threat is even there in the closest thing we get to intimacy between the mom and dad; “I reached over,” says the mom, “and pinched the place where his shirt and Kevlar underneath met.”
The mom and dad (and the compassionate clerk) are all working to make sure “the water is okay” in the quiet mundanity of their day to day. For the boy, for all of us.
Repeating the words of Foster Wallace: “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” These realities are not talked about in “The Fishless Cycle.” They are floating around all the characters. As in the story we covered last week (Andrew Plimpton’s inviting “Breadcrumbs”), what isn’t said often carries more weight than what is addressed directly.
I deliberately introduced this story without preface this Monday because I didn’t want to blow the ending, and I won’t do that now. I will say that the restraint it must have taken for Tuazon to not dive into the dramatics implied at the close must have been formidable. We’re left, instead, on the brink of the passing of one of life’s sign posts, the one indicating the end of childhood. The satisfaction in reading this powerful story comes from witnessing loving parents and a compassionate community aligned as they hold a small hand through it.
Reed Magazine is an annual literary journal published by San José State University, the oldest of its kind in California (since 1867).
Beyond taking submissions for the journal, they host contests in each genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry) and offer a special contest for high schoolers in Santa Clara County. They seek submissions that exhibit craft, complexity, and creativity while giving voice to a diverse array of artists at various stages in their careers.
Writers may submit fiction pieces of up to 5,000 words. Aesthetically, Reed is open to most styles and approaches, including experimental and literary. All works should be stand-alone short stories, not chapters of longer works. Their submission window is open now (from 5/1 through 10/1/26).
For a wider introduction to E. P. Tuazon’s work, visit their website.
Many thanks to E.P. Tuazon and Reed Magazine for bringing “The Fishless Cycle” to the wider world.
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