Okay so I was reading about octopi yesterday, and how they’re super intelligent (like scary intelligent), build fences and even little shelters for themselves, and have discovered that it’s easier to jump onto fishing vessels to steal from the catch buckets than to actually catch fish themselves.
I read all this and what pops into my mind?
A little old lady on a beach house waiting for her sailor husband to come home.
She fishes on the beach at night, but she’s not really fishing. She’s looking over the water and waiting, hoping, wishing to see his little rowboat. The one or two fish she may catch get tossed in a bucket, but she still stares at the water.
She doesn’t notice the octopus sneak from the shoreline and wrap his tentacles around one of her catches. He eyes her suspiciously, ready for her to defend her prey like any good predator, but the woman doesn’t notice.
Nor does she notice the second night.
But on the third night, after catching a rather small fish, she tosses it in the bucket, sticks the rod in the sand, and just sits.
The octopus slinks from the water at the usual time, when she would have already caught a snack or two, and their eyes finally meet.
“So you’re the extra hand in my cookie jar,” the woman chuckles in a sad voice. “Come on over then, get your dinner.”
He is wary, but she doesn’t seem prone to quick movements. She always seems to move rather slow. He weaves his way across the shore, cautiously reaches a tentacle into the bucket, and bounds back for the water, his eyes on her the whole time.
Many nights go by like this, and the octopus always knows when to expect her. Every night, he sits ever just closer to her as she pushes the bucket of her meager catch his way, and talks. He doesn’t understand the words but he knows that whatever a husband is, she wants him back, and whatever kids are, she wanted those, too. It didn’t seem like a lot to want to him.
If he could have, he would have easily traded her those things for the fish she gives him each night.
But one night, as the moon reflects on the waters of the sea and the octopus stretches his tentacles to meet his friend…
He paces the beach for a time. No bucket. No rod. No recent footsteps. He looks warily to the weirdly lit wooden cave she returns to after their visits. It is far from the water, but perhaps not too far.
Perhaps she simply forgot what time it is.
As he reaches the wooden enclosure, he finds an entrance only partly barred and squeezes through its opening. Inside, there are shells, and there are images of his friend, and what he assumes are friends of hers, maybe even the husband she wanted back so badly.
As he ventures further, he finds his friend.
Only, she is not there anymore.
He brings a tentacle to her face, but she doesn’t respond. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t smile.
The octopus leaves, sad and confused. She was a kind hearted hunter who never balked at sharing a meal. She deserved whatever that husband was, and whatever kids were, but he knows he can’t do any of that now, even if he could before.
Every night, when they would have met on the beach and watched the water, he crawls from the shoreline with a shell in his tentacle, a shell like the ones she liked so much in her wooden cave.
And he places it around her resting place.
When her wooden cave is completely surrounded by the shell fence, he knows she’ll rest peacefully, her body protected from any scavengers who might happen by.
It was all he could do, but he wished he could have done so much more.
