An Octopus Mother Dies After Bearing Her Young

NO MORE OUTINGS. Home, I bring in the walnut cheeseboard, eat the ever-loving pork chops Dylan made me hours ago, now cold and congealed. Migraine emerging. Where is he? Saturday errands? Chores? Didn’t notice car there or gone. Stand in the kitchen to rinse off my dish and hear Dylan yell from our bedroom, “I’m going to start cleaning the kitchen and working on that broken screen door hinge. What is all that junk in bags by the front door?  I’ve got about an hour before I head out.”

The paper bags? Forgot that dawn’s early light sorting session.

“Nothing. Just junk. Baby shit I kept for awhile,” I say, as he walks down the stairs, into the kitchen, holding the paper bags. All of my dead child’s worldly possessions sorted, nearly gone. Second thoughts now.  “Get rid of all of it, please. I sorted it in bags. For friends or the thrift store. Some to keep. But it’s too much now. I can’t face it.”

“Got it. I’ll take care of it,” he says.

“Wait,” I say, grabbing Jeanette’s Christmas stocking from the Keep bag. “I want to hang this up this year.”

“So Santa can bring her toys?” he asks, looking confused. “Is that a joke?”

“I want Santa to bring her back to me,” I say, deadpan and Dylan’s embarrassed, I can tell. His face turns pale. He coughs.

“Fine. No. Wait. Take everything,” I say, handing him the stocking. Mama, give it all away.

“I don’t have the energy for this today,” he says, closing the front door loudly behind him.

Hear garage door open, car pull out, goodbye for now. Alone again. Collapse on the couch and find the solemn respite of TV. White noise, blessed absolution, careful dissolve of not having to be present or think or plan or decide or disagree. No unemployment. No nothing. A reality show about wannabe chefs charged with making a dessert using rhubarb.

“Jeanette, I would nail that,” I say out loud.

Lie across couch and think back to farmers market, to Frank and Last Chance Farms. How he seemed engaged, swarmed, in the thick of a kelp bed, unlike my stagnated existence, annihilated. No job, friends distant, no schedule tethering me to the predictable rhythms of a baby’s needs: food, sleep, water, love.

Piles of lemons at Frank’s stand and how I picked up the first board my hand touched and lifted it to my nose, smelled. Linseed oil like my mother’s paints. Touched each ring on the walnut board and imagined a child, each a year passing, then the whole thing sliced up and dried and rubbed for 50 hours and sold. Retrieve the board and examine on the couch, rubbing the lines. Frank: starfish, thousands of tuber feet on five arms reaching for everything at once. Me: slowly dying mother octopus, withered after laying her babies’ eggs.

Audience on TV cheers and on the screen the first contestant looks just like my horrendous boss, the Walrus, and I’m back in the thick of it, that hateful world of apprehension, an underlying creep of unease. I just want to feel safe again.

Tingle, fizz, a golden orb but this time I’m not alone. Today, my baby is with me, too. Why now? Not lost. No need for finding. Turn off the television and close my eyes and imagine the sea. Cold water, the chill of the Pacific Ocean flooding tide pools in winter, casting nets around a rock face, edge and bottom of a rock, buried for now. I’m a kid on the beach and I see a tangle of kelp coils knotted and fixed around a black-holed rock. Colors muted by ocean water, gelled, pickled, preserved, still until my four-year-old hand digs out something red, then another red, worm, perhaps a worm, now moving. I stand back, holding the mystery creature. I square off my legs and arms I’m a miniature donkey and heave over the holdfast with one strong kick, looking for more animals. I reveal a nest of red octopi, tiny.

Later, learn that these are infant Giant Pacific Octopuses, but at four, I recognize the rudimentary only: tentacles, eight, and head translates into octopus. I seek to extract specimens, but the creatures are slick and reluctant, and I finally force one out. In retaliation, the cephlapod inserts its pushpin-sized beak into the tender skin of my inner wrist and screws in its venomous plug of ouch. I only learned why it hurt so badly when I studied the creatures years later. They bite with beak and kill with venom. A kid, I just knew sharp pain. Where was my mother at that moment? I see her nowhere, just see me, crying, furious and I hurl the animal back out to sea.

Red octopus thrown is who I want to become. Like the auburn string in Persephone’s hand, hurled, tug, following the cord through the labyrinth to its monstrous center, a minotaur will find me and I will slay it, like my own disappeared red blood flow then cuts through one day after months of being gone, the cycle of blood returned, post-baby. What will make my moorings loosed, my boulder founder? How can I become whole again? I am half-Persephone, sunk in the underworld waiting for my mother, and half-Ariadne, slaying the the minotaur and using my red thread to lead me out of the labyrinth, mistress and monster, victim and prey, both at once, flight and fight, frozen, embodied as a Great Pacific Octopus trapped under a rock, during the year’s lowest tide. Ocean retreated, body exposed, a single sneaker wave could either save me or wipe me out altogether.