High Bodied Brilliant Blue Turquoise Discus

“Daydream blue! It looks just like that color when I was mixing paints!” she exclaimed, looking into my tank and seeing the high bodied brilliant blue turquoise discus.

This hybrid made her excited.

She was Judy, and although quite young, hip, and totally hip about animals of all kinds. She wore a silver lip ring, a noticeable piercing on her otherwise unscarred face.

“I’mma hit you back in a minute
I don’t play tag, I been it
We don’t mess with lies, we don’t do goodbyes
We just keep it pushing like aye yi yi,” she sang, imitating Lizzo’s hit song.

“Lizzo, right?” I said.

She said yeah and then she told me Lizzo said she once played with Prince and it changed her life. “Colors, they changed my life! That hybrid there, it’s colors are the bomb!”

I proceeded to sing “Purple Rain” in my best Prince impression yet but she just laughed and said how colors indeed play an amazing part in our lives.

Then she told me how she used to mix paints at this hardware store in New Jersey and how colors took over her life even when she slept. Her dreams, she claimed, were loaded with some of the sophisticated colors trapped in her subconscious and gleaned from the paint mixing job.

Color names like Lavender Wash and Ray of Light and Hannah Banana.

“But that fish right there is a cross between two distinct colors I remember mixing in those paints,“ she said. “Dayummm! It’s as if the paint colors of Avalan Teal and Intuition had a bambino and named it Daydream!”

At first I thought this girl was on medicinal herb or something but I started thinking about what she was saying and I realized she was right and this discus was, like her, ruling its Fishdom.

She invited me to go watch the Fireworks that July but our 4th came and went quickly due to clouds transformed into a Purple Rain. Still, the rains of Independence Day begat the ultimate color lovers dream… a rainbow.

Rule your Fishdom!

By Robert Gluck