The Octopus Princess

by Cathy Ulrich

An Octopus Has Three Hearts

After the water recedes, we go back to our houses, swollen and damp. Reeking of the sea. We’ve been staying at the church up the hill, sleeping on donated cots in Sunday School classrooms. You have memorized The Golden Rule from the poster on the wall. You have fallen in love with the word unto.

Do unto others, you say while your mother plucks dead fish out of her flower bed, drops them into a sopping pillowcase.

I should leave some, she says, as fertilizer.

My mother is sweeping water out the back door at our house. She’s got her jeans rolled up to her knees, got my father’s galoshes on.

The ground collapses under our feet, muddy ground, as we go back and forth between our back yards, picking up things from the flood. You find a wallet, a ring. I find a man’s shoe, your sister’s teddy bear. We dig the bear deep into the mud, cover its bean-button eyes.

She won’t need it anymore, you say, right? But we lay the wallet and the ring and the shoe in your cracked driveway. In case there’s someone needing them, missing them.

Do unto others, you say, right?

There’s a tree at the back of your property. It’s the only tree around. Your mother got it as a sapling — and you’re in love with that word too, sapling — when she and your father were first married. She met your father overseas, she always said, which could be anywhere from here. You are half and half, you like to say, but when we hold up our arms to compare, there’s no difference in the color of our skin. You could be from the island, too. Not like your mother’s tree. She struggled to keep it alive here, tree that didn’t belong. A maple or something, you think, slide your tongue over the word sapling, slide your hand over the tree’s trunk.

We think it’s a kite in the tree, tangled in the branches, someone flying a kite as the wind picked up, before the waves came. You poke it with a stick and the kite shudders.

It’s an octopus, you say with glee. It’s the happiest I’ve seen you in days.

You know so many things about octopuses. You like the number eight, fat and double-round.

Is it still alive, I say.

As long as its skin is wet, it can breathe, you say. This is one of the things you know about octopuses. You know other things too, like they have three hearts and can unlock doors.

Your mother always said she had three hearts, too: one for you and one for your father and one for your sister.

Back at her flower bed, your mother is tying off the pillowcase of dead fish and crying. I have seen how tightly she grips you when you sleep beside her on the church cot, like the waters will take you away as they ebb. You’re pretending you don’t hear your mother crying; I’m pretending it, too.

Let’s save the octopus, you say, prepare to climb the tree. Let’s do that at least.

An Octopus Has Blue Blood

Our parents won’t let us go to the sea. My mother and father, your mother. Purse their mouths and shake their heads. They don’t trust the sea now, look out from the church windows like something has betrayed them.

We put the octopus in your flooded basement instead. You worry the water isn’t deep enough. You worry about things now, gnaw on your knuckles before bed, cry in your sleep. See the overturned cars beside the road when we walk back to the church, say: How will they ever turn them back over.

They’ve got equipment for that, says my father.

He says: Don’t worry, rubs the top of your head.

He’s been helping at the grocery store, trying to save the food before it spoils. His boots were all muddy when he met us at our houses. My mother says he can’t wear them in the church.

We’re guests here, she says.

Guests, you whisper, another word you love, the stretchy vowel in the middle of it.

You and I sneak away to the music room. There are always kids in there. Little ones like your sister was, medium ones like us. The big kids have to go and help. The big kids lean shovels up against the side of the church, sigh like the grownups do: Oh, my aching back.

There’s a little boy in the music room when we get there, eating peanut butter with his fingers. He’s gotten some on the piano keys. When my mother comes to get us, she’ll say to the boy with the peanut butter fingers, where is your mother? and the boy won’t know. He watches us color in the books the rescue workers brought for us, sad plastic packs of three crayons: red, yellow and green.

Why couldn’t they do blue, at least, you say.

Blue is a primary color, you say.

The coloring books are for kids littler than us, but we color them anyway, write thank you notes for the rescue workers in red and green. The yellow is practically invisible.

Will the octopus be okay, I say and you say the octopus will be okay, and the little boy with the peanut butter fingers says octopus, octopus, and wants to color in one of our coloring books, but his fingers are too sticky and we won’t let him.

In the morning, we go with our mothers back to our houses. My father goes off with the other strong men, with the big kids and their shovels. You and I pull treasures out of the mud: a piece of red yarn, a cracked plate, a dingy dime. We put them in your driveway with the others, make sure not to lay them on the crack, make sure not to step on the crack.

They’ll be so happy, you say, we found their things.

I nod, make the yarn into shapes on the ground: a circle, a square, a heart, a line, a worm, a snake.

You say yarn, you say plate, you say dime. You say: yarn, yarn, yarn, and stamp your foot down on it right near my fingers, then smile.

This one’s only garbage, you say, isn’t it.

Our mothers are in your house looking for things that can be saved. They don’t mean like the octopus; they mean shoes, silverware, family albums.

You’ll want these things, my mother says to your mother. You will. Someday, you will.

We go quiet into your basement, past our mothers in your kitchen. Go quiet down the damp stairs. You whisper to the octopus, have given it a name. I pretend not to know. In your flooded basement, we are as still and quiet as we can be, and the basement is still and quiet, and the octopus is still and quiet, too.

An Octopus Is A Master Of Camouflage

You want to take the octopus back to the sea.

Before it starves, you say, except you actually say before she starves, because you say the octopus is a girl, is a princess octopus, long awaited in her underwater kingdom. You say things like this sometimes, still play with plastic swords and rhinestone tiaras.

There are princesses and knights and dragons in our coloring books at the church. You give all the princesses hair so pale yellow it looks white. You wish for brown crayons, for remote-controlled racecars, for video games.

You say: What do you wish for, but I can’t say, won’t say, color a dragon red and green, don’t look up at your expectant face.

The octopus is in the corner of your basement, where the water is deepest. It looks like an inflatable ball. The octopus reaches for you with its arms, one by one by one by one. Upstairs, our mothers are talking funerals, talking goodbyes, talking closure.

The stack at the only crematory on the island has been burning smoke for days, days and days and days.

I wonder who it is, you say when you see it. I wonder who this time.

I can hear your mother say, my tree, even, look at it, crying. And my mother: It’s okay, you don’t have to always be strong.

You have your fingers on the octopus, say it feels like banana skin, you should try, like banana skin, and you were the one that carried the octopus here; I only watched. I don’t want to touch the octopus, don’t love it like you do, don’t believe in princesses or knights or any of that.

We should tell them, I say, they might let us take it back to the sea if we tell them, but you shake your head.

You say: No.

You say: No, it’s my secret. It’s mine.

An Octopus Is Bilaterally Symmetric

There is chili for dinner at the church. There is always chili for dinner and browned from-a-box cornbread. My father dips his piece in the chili and you munch and munch on yours, leave your spoon on the plate. Your mother says thank you, no, thank you, and only takes one of the water bottles the rescue workers are offering, rolling it back and forth in her hands.

We’ve been learning hymns, you say. A piece of cornbread is stuck to the corner of your mouth. In the music room, we’ve been learning hymns.

How lovely, says my mother, and your mother nods. Who’s been teaching you?

No one, you say. There’s books. We learn them from the books.

How lovely, my mother says again, and lets us go to the music room without putting our plates away. There is red juice to drink, and we both have mustaches from hurrying it down. Your mother smiles a bit, kisses you on the side of your face.

You kids have fun, she says.

We smile. We say: We will. We say: It’s so fun in the music room. We love the coloring and the hymns and the piano.

Good, says your mother. Good.

A big girl comes into the music room while we’re coloring, sits down at the piano, runs her fingers up and down the keys. In the end, she plays How Great Thou Art, mutters the words in a way that’s not quite singing.

These keys are sticky, she says.

She starts to go, but you drop one of the packs of crayons on the floor in front of her, very deliberately.

Have you ever seen an octopus? you say.

Once, she says. Big girls like her don’t usually talk to kids like us. She bends down and picks up the crayons, worries them in her hands like your mother and the water bottle.

Once, she says again. I was swimming in the cove with my parents. There was one then. My mother said it was poisonous.

Venomous, you insert. All octopuses are venomous.

My mother said poisonous, says the big girl. She didn’t know.

You nod.

We had to go away very quickly. I remember it was smaller than I thought.

The big girl dips her head.

That’s all? you say.

The big girl says: My dog died. In the flood. My dog died.

Her lower lip quivers; she rolls and rolls the crayons between her hands. She says: It’s not fair, right? None of it’s fair.

An Octopus Has An Excellent Sense Of Touch

She’s all alone, you say when you wake up in the night on the cot beside your mother. She’s all alone, all alone.

You wake your mother and my mother and my father and me. They all go crowding to you, stroking your hair and your upper arm and your fingertips, say the usual grownup things: It’s going to be okay, it’s all going to be okay.

I sit on my cot alone in the dark, can’t see The Golden Rule poster, can’t see anything.

Unto, I say like you would do, only quiet, quiet, quiet. Do unto others as you would have done unto you.

An Octopus Becomes Senescent

The funerals start the next day. People are living in the churches and the schools, so they are held at the top of the hiking trail, folding chairs set out in rows. Grandmothers with canes climb up and up slowly, fathers carrying dirty-chin babies, everybody, everybody. Your mother holds your hand and my mother holds mine. There aren’t enough chairs for everyone. You and I sit on the ground like the other kids do. Your mother offers her chair to a bearded old man, then to a pregnant girl.

Do I look that bad, she whispers to my mother when they refuse. Do I look that tired?

Allow them their kindness, my mother whispers back, and nods for you and me that we can go with the other kids when the talking starts, stacking rocks, digging through the dirt. You and I go, when she’s not looking, down the trail, quiet first, then running, hurry to your basement, hurry to the octopus.

You help this time, you say to me. You have to.

You say: I can’t carry her to the water all on my own.

I say: All right.

I say: All right, all right, all right.

You smile again like you did when we found the octopus in the tree, smile like you used to do. We look back up the trail and can’t hear the words.

You keep looking back, even after we have collected the octopus from your basement, holding it between our hands together. It doesn’t feel to me anything like a banana skin. It has two of its arms clasped round your wrist.

Does that hurt, I say, and you say, does what hurt, and the octopus quivers and you don’t even know you’re crying.

Your mother’s tree is sad and bent when we go past it and I think it won’t live, it probably won’t live, try not to look at it, at you, but the only thing to look at is the octopus. Princess Martina, you call it.

She’d like it, right, you say, an octopus named after her, and I say yeah, yeah, she would, and then we are at the sea.

The water is as warm as I remember, the sand is as soft.

It’s not scary at all, is it? you say. Not now.

We wade out together, holding the octopus. We dip it into the water, watch it come alive bit by bit. Let it slip from our hands, let it go.

You look back again, look back where everyone else is on the island, saying goodbye.

They’ll do that for them, too, won’t they, you say. My father and my sister.

Yes, I say. Yes, yes.

You say: Even though they can’t find them?

I say: Even though they can’t find them.

About the author

Cathy Ulrich is a writer from landlocked Montana, but she’s seen the ocean a few times. It was fine. Her work has been published in various journals, including Former Cactus, Cleaver Magazine and Third Point Press.

Credits

LF #121 © 2018 Cathy Ulrich. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, August 2018. Edited by Beth Gilstrap. Cover design by Troy Palmer, using images from The Noun Project. (credits: Felix Brönnimann )

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