The Octopus Museum

by Brenda Shaughnessy

  After millions of years of disinterested, shell-less floating and sea-floor-attaching, they only developed shells in response to a new scene in the oceans. Predators became invented and the undersea nobodies strategized with zero brains.

  The “new” predators were the first on earth, the first dog to eat dog in this world. Mollusks grew shells, homes, and stayed inside for millions more years, sometimes daring to stick a foot out, footing around for food.

  You see these shells on the beach. Or you did before, when we walked on the beach free as birds plucking innards. They are decorative, sheeny little half-compacts—each a grim acquiescence to a new regime, and the first resistance.

  When my grandma was little she heard the maxim “It’s a dog-eat-dog world” as “It’s a doggy dog world.” Oh little grandma! Before mollusks were forced to grow shells it was doggy-dog out there. But ever since then we’re hungry all the time.

  We also dream of multiple-ingredient meals. Carrots for dinner two nights a week is not what we imagined when we thought we chose Vegan Paradise, or before when we believed in the feelings of animals but still ate them with relish, hot sauce, mustard, and regret.

  We envisioned rainbow salads with cream-free goddess dressing, long, funky grains of every stripe mixed with soups of the world, not a medium-large can of beets per family as a treat on Tuesdays. Fridays we get beans and whatever lettuce is lying around. Bitter stems, semi-liquid.

  Before, we could always count on at least a heel or two of gluten loaf, but it depends on which cruelty-full Before you’re thinking of. Me, I’m thinking of all the Befores, like all old people who have no future.

  ————

  Before our COO learned how to communicate electronically, we thought they were merely naïvely excited about “life on land” (LOL) so we equally naively helped them build COOPS (Cephalo-Octopodal Oceanostomy Pods).

  Soon we realized we’d been doubly naive and they’d been zero naive because they used their new land mobility to access the world’s Electronic Communication Operating Systems (ECOS) and boy could they type fast.

  It became clear that they, the COO (Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords) were taking over. While we were still marveling at the cuteness of YouTube videos showing early COO antics and enjoying the adorableness of their eight-legged smartypants brand,

  they had reconfigured the ECOS language, and took over every computer, grid, and control center. We still do not know their language. We think they think we are too stupid to learn it and we know they know they are probably right.

  COO read, or rather ingested, the entire internet in a matter of weeks. Who knew their decentralized nervous system, advanced visual acuity, and eight highly sensitive mega-arms would make such quick work in the realm of keystrokes and swipe commands?

  It’s almost as if we invented this technology to play to their specific evolutionary strengths. They have complex, light-sensitive, four-dimensional, laser vision and we have 20/20 hindsight.

  The COO renamed itself the CEO (Cephalopod Electro-Overlords)—dropping the Octopus nickname as an outdated, human-centric, offensive term that excluded squid, nautiluses, and other potential commanding officers and executives-in-training.

  Likewise, COOPS are now called COPS, installed in watchtowers and moats in every human settlement. Most of us work in their salinizing centers. Before, we dumped our waste and garbage into their oceans, and ruined that delicate world.

  ————

  Their vast home of millions of years destroyed, the COO came ashore. We knew they were intelligent. They could open jars and pretend to be more poisonous creatures than they, ostensibly, were. We found them darling, delicious.

  They don’t understand our racism. They change color and blend in. To them, change is only ever considered a natural gift, a condition of being. The real skill is survival. Knowing how to change—not color or mind or body or action but perspective—and refusing to do it is how species vanish.

  My shell has become relatively substantial—proportionate to the amount of danger I’m in. I’m a woman. A mother. I am very soft and have so much to protect. Many women and mothers, even the old and weak, have the strongest shells.

  Except certain pale women who were extremely wealthy Before. They seem to lack a certain enzyme. Their shells are transparent, bendable, a vinyl-like film, but porous like all they can grow and carry on their backs is a flimsy safety net.

  Mine’s a cross between hardwood and Corian, the plastic-stone stuff they used to make slightly cheaper kitchen counters. Of course it’s not really made of those materials. It’s made of me. Thick-middled, silver-streaked, motherfucking furious me.

  I don’t know about men’s shells. They won’t tell me and I don’t care enough to care. Maybe I blame them for all the years of cluelessness and rampage. Or I’m ashamed of us all and prefer to think mostly about my daughter, how she’s getting by.

  SPECIAL COLLECTION: “AS THEY WERE”

  The Home Team

  I liked Jane’s team. I’d bet money on them but it wasn’t that kind of thing. Too disorganized, plus it was just lunchtime pickup winterball with deflated goal bulbs and not enough of the good knee-gel to go around. The kids were tough. The kids goofed. Jane shone.

  She worried that winterball like a craft, then, like it was nothing, she’d plffft it dead center while everyone else looked sleepy, sidewise, a full surprise every time. Her main move always a low private conversation with the air. Then lightning knees you could never see.

  The rest of the team shot sparks on occasion. Tella’s swift half-bank could rattle the shoulder of the thickest bulb-guard, and The Brain (a sticky girl in Advanced Graphmatics) had all the angles. We stood in the stands like snipers, trying to see what The Brain saw but never did till the fluke-score landed from outer space. Jane again, invisibly.

  Some girls thought winterball too mean-streaked, too psychic. My oldest daughter could hardly watch, preferring hockey. They shared a season so it was one or the other in our town. My younger daughter would rather ice-swim, but even in her ice-hole in the lake, her eyes followed Jane.

  Our hearts were in Jane’s feet, her hands. All the bills we couldn’t pay, the wishing for electricity and lit-up screens of pleasure, the food gone rotten because no one could bring themselves to eat it—Jane gave us so many more chances to do it right this time.

  We couldn’t give our kids the bountiful, bullet-proof homes we wanted, but we could insist on watching them try to win their childhoods back, inspecting their scraped knees before the raw red and pink dappled wounds turned burgundy, into crusts of edible leather.

  Irreversible Change

  The metal fires could burn for days, glowing green without fuel, fearless. So much power was wasted on finding power sources, those electric-detectors we’d all believed in back then. They were orphans now, like us. No parent companies, no mama’s lullabies.

  The metal fires were art. Steel sculptures massive as ships but not ship-shaped. Spirals and spires, coils and arches, vines and limbs all gleaming with extra-terrestrial symbols. Forms only an artist with likely expensive access to divinity could understand.

  An artist takes utilitarian materials and diverts that use to mystery. So that was the source of its power—it could mystically hold flame longer than any other material. A post-apocalyptic menorah, but no one was going anywhere.

  A magical transmutation magically transmuted back to utility. A twice-told tale. What a strange glow it gave! Like a gargantuan spiritual generator producing for humans the light they liked best: electric-looking. Goddish. Exponential sun and stadium.

  So much art was destroyed looking for more power. Paintings hooked up to electrodes, landscapes with visible landmines. Some of the better pottery bombed for phosphorescence, the blaze in their glaze. Dancers were el
ectrocuted by semi-accident,

  their choreographers’ brains taken out for experiments that yielded only dead choreographers. They were the only ones who didn’t watch their young stars leaping, contorted, flying up impossibly. The extensions brilliant, the velocity. Coming down meat.

  Anyone who practiced their art did so secretly, and we all learned not to talk about our dreams, those visions, which could be misunderstood and burned alive. We gathered on hillsides and watched the green glow, each of us exploding with poetry silent inside.

  Dream of Brown

  I am dressed in brown, at a long brown wooden table set for twelve, one of many tables stretching forever. Many seats are empty, but it is mealtime. Each tabletop place is demarcated into sections, a hole for each person to sink a cup so we can barely pull it out by the slightly flared edge when we want to drink. It helps to lever it up with the thin edge of a brown wooden knife.

  The shallow but persistent ridges bordering each person’s eating space exist so that we don’t, with our big, hungry body, spill over into someone else’s space. The air is brown, and the food different shades of it, and the plates are wooden. Everything is ragged, old-looking, except for the Invisible Watchers, who enforce the rules and, I get the sense, are brand-new.

  I sense this because I have been here a long time.

  I am sitting in my designated space, two long spaces empty on my right and left sides. I can see you before I know it’s you, but once I know it’s you I can hardly look. You’re so strange, dressed in a richer, stronger brown than everything else.

  You sit near me, leaving still one space empty between us. I can’t believe how good I suddenly feel. Excitement, possibility, hope. I think of the ways I could manage to eat in front of you, giddily, clumsily, hardly at all. And I must move closer. You might want me to—it could be—I believe you do.

  I move my body like a pawn, one space. It’s not a big move but an illegal one. Closing the space between us, I could swear there’s the smallest bead of delight dropping from your face onto your lap.

  It’s not long before one of the Invisible Watchers sees. A deep, Vader-like voice informs me over the loudspeaker: the seat I have stolen is already spoken for, and if I don’t reclaim my original, designated space, immediately, they will give it to someone else. Then I will have no place.

  No place in the realm to keep myself alive, however barely. For that one spot assigned to me is the only place I am allowed to receive meals. Giving it up is suicide. I don’t move. I don’t move and don’t move for long, long minutes. That’s how I wake up every morning but this isn’t a dream.

  I Want the World

  You never know, when you say goodbye, if it’s the last time. Last time for who? For what?

  Every time is the last—for that particular goodbye, wearing those clothes, at that airport. Me in my black dress—nightgown, fifties housecoat, funeral uniform. It passes for anything.

  My daughter in her fuchsia track shorts and faded green t-shirt almost as soft as her luscious little arms. She was complaining, as usual. She was hungry. She was tired of traveling.

  Her complaints were especially unpleasant since they only pointed up how innocent she was of how bad everything could get. The Legos are boring? Imagine no toys of any kind.

  The chicken nuggets are too hot? Just wait. They’ll cool and by then, I hope she can learn to like lizard blood and shoelace chewing gum, because that’s what’s coming.

  A fierce zip of pride bites my heart. She demands more because she knows there’s more in the world and she believes she should have it all. She knows what she wants: what she wants.

  She believes the world is coming to her, not veering definitively away. She still thinks we can choose between ice cream flavors, bless her that she has so many possible flavors in mind.

  Between stuffed animals and dolls. Which color lunch box you want for the whole school year. What school year? I think. Will first grade exist this coming fall?

  She still thinks that what she thinks will affect what she gets. She still believes tantrums might get her her way. She doesn’t know yet that nobody gets her way.

  We’re all lucky if we get anything at all, come dinnertime, come night, the next morning and the next hot morning, the next endangered livingspace if we get to stay there. We can’t carry all that stuff. But she doesn’t think of it as stuff.

  She thinks of it as what she wants. Life’s been consistent—me resisting her demands, me in my black dress, cutting my hair to make her paintbrushes. If something happens to me, who will help her believe her beliefs?

  She believes her desires—as erratic and irrational as a six-year-old’s desires can be—nevertheless have intrinsic value. A thread of hope wound, inextricable, all around and through her very person. I believe that, too.

  One of these mornings I’ll say goodbye, a routine goodbye when I go to the FedPlex warehouse to work or pick my rations, and in my absence she will lose that thread, come to fully understand what she wants is impossible in our world.

  All of it, any of it, the tiniest thing, impossible.

  I won’t have known but I’ll be walking away from my daughter for the last time, coming home (wherever home is) to someone new, someone broken off from my old girl, six years old.

  Here, I tell her, providing a pencil with a pristine, unsharpened end, chew on this. Nobody’s touched it yet. It’s all yours, darling.

  Somewhere I’ll find a blade to sharpen it, and we’ll find a scrap for drawing, a bit of napkin or a smooth, light stone. For now, you can chew on it. Soon you’ll be able to draw whatever you want.

  Evening Prayer for the Humans

  That’s not windblown hair in your eyes, it’s the roots curling through you, and you’ve died, but it’s not forever. Nothing is.

  Headstones little heads peeking out the blanket.

  Wood swirl looks like a yoni, auto-sexual.

  Bugs don’t have to be what they’re not, in their spirals and blind shapes overturning, eating you.

  One fever broke and now you’re cooling, resting. Becoming, like the rocks, the same self as ever, this time all the way through. It was never just you.

  Being dead is a lot like being alive. You don’t know enough to say it, or have no way to know. Or you don’t know you know—that’s what being alive is like.

  You don’t remember—sleep was a broken egg after heavy evening sex. Ferns parted like curtains, like legs, to let you through.

  The streaks dried in the shape of a dragonfly.

  The day was made for you to join the others. They are working already, points oscillating to drill collective holes in the Big Shroud everyone’s making for everyone else equally.

  Others like you, unlike you. They are thirsty, and smart, and aching, waiting for you to carry their load.

  The Dessert I Didn’t Have

  Grilled peaches on shortbread with raspberries and black pepper ice cream.

  We’re all out, said the communicative waiter.

  That was twelve years ago.

  “TO SERVE MAN”: RITUALS OF THE LATE ANTHROPOCENE COLONY

  Bakamonotako

  I was thinking of changing my name to Bakamonotako. It meant The Stupid Little Octopus Girl, she was a character from an old Japanese folk tale. I read her story on a plaque outside the Little Sea Monster Museum Sculpture Garden. I thought she was a lot like me.

  From a good family of upstanding octopi, Bakamonotako felt she did not need her eight appendages, she only needed four. Two to wash and work and two to walk and wander.

  To the embarrassment and horror of her family, she let her other four limbs fall into such disuse that they withered and fell away. So she resembled a human being, with two arms, two legs, except that her mouth and genitalia were the same or
ifice.

  Like all stupid little girls who believe they can best become themselves by being unlike themselves, she eventually came to miss her lost limbs. At times, fully tattooed people feel so about their lost original skin.

  When Bakamonotako matured and tried to have sexual relations as an adult octopus, the limbs she cast off with her mind wrapped around her and bound her, keeping her from any feeling.

  Embittered and maddened by this, she consulted a wise starfish about her future. The starfish said “You must find the other half of yourself, of your private and deepest feeling, and you might have to double yourself to do it.”

  The starfish asked Bakamonotako for twice her usual fee for this advice, and the stupid little octopus girl paid half in sand dollars and half in sand dollars she hoped to collect in the future.

  With only half her limbs, she would need to spend twice as much time scrambling in the sand on the ocean floor to find these dollars. She could see already how her fate of constantly halving and doubling was playing itself out, never to be whole, clear, even.

  She had spent her future already, searching for sand dollars to pay the starfish for advice about her future, which had already been determined by her past.

  “At this rate,” thought Bakamonotako, “I’ll spend my whole life looking backwards, neither living nor not living. Unless I can figure out how to accomplish the seemingly impossible task set forth by the wise starfish.”

  G-Bread

  One of my indulgences was going to the Gingerbread House some evenings, sitting gingerly in a little gingerbread chair to eat the best g-bread. For saturation and when I could splurge the money. I felt him, one day, peeking in the sugar-frosted windows but of course he did not come in.