Page 85 - The Midnight Library

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Fish Tank

e shrewd-eyed librarian was back at her chessboard and hardly looked up

as Nora arrived back.
‘Well, that was terrible.’
Mrs Elm smiled, wr yly. ‘It just shows you, doesn’t it?’
‘Shows me what?’
‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I

said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’
Nora studied Mrs Elm’s face. Was she enjoying this?
‘Why did I stay?’ Nora asked. ‘Why didn’t I just come home, aer she

died?’
Mrs Elm shrugged. ‘You got stuck. You were grieving. You were
depressed. You know what depression is like.’
Nora understood this. She thought of a study she had read about
somewhere, about fish. Fish were more like humans than most people think.

Fish get depression. ey had done tests with zebrafish. ey had a fish
tank and they drew a horizontal line on the side of it, halfway down, in
marker pen. Depressed fish stayed below the line. But give those same fish

Prozac and they go above the line, to the top of their tanks, darting about
like new.
Fish get depressed when they have a lack of stimulation. A lack of
ever ything. When they are just there, floating in a tank that resembles
nothing at all.

Maybe Australia had been her empty fish tank, once Izzy had gone.
Maybe she just had no incentive to swim above the line. And maybe even
Prozac – or fluoxetine – wasn’t enough to help her rise up. So she was just