Senescence
She built her nest as carefully as he had built hers.
After the diagnosis, he became fascinated with the brevity of a six-to-eighteen-month lifespan.
As a submariner dockside in Okinawa, he strode through the fish, the others, with a young man’s disdain. At the time, he only saw the slime, the xenophobia-inducing suction.
Now, the kinetics compelled him. The cephalopod was a creature of deliberation, and even its name was dignified: it could move fast, but it was made for dying slow.
For fifteen weeks, he immersed himself in the subterranean. He lavished a lover’s care and a chemist’s attention on the tank, one hundred gallons of foreign soil. Nothing prepared him for the day he brought her home. Her arms waved, grace and beauty and the intentional, cruel drawing forth that only the seafloor spawns.
For days, she hid when he came to feed her, leaving behind the cracked-up shells of oysters. Then, one day, he opened the tank to slip in her breakfast, tender crab remnants, and saw her. She slid out, clenching her tentacles as though saying hello.
Over the subsequent weeks, he felt his memories detach like the octopus’s regenerative arms, but he never forgot her. At first, she seldom emerged, like a shy Japanese lady confined to the inner quarters. But, after a time, she would spiral out of her chambers and engage him in a pas de deux. She loved to nudge him arm and dart around the tank, retrieving a toy for him to grapple with her. It was a clever game, a little indulgence, even when he cycled the water of her tank.
But in the allotted time, his frown lines deepened, and she cradled her body as though she ached all over. The beauty of the ocean is in its cruelty and its evocation of the passage of time—at once eternal and ephemeral. Her treats rotted in their shells, and she cherished a new obsession: to build. She shut herself in a den, frantic to fulfill her one urge: to hatch eggs she would never actualize, fragments evanescing into remembered sea-gilt and stardust.
She emerged once again, as the forums predicted. Always, he had let her close without surrendering his humanity, his unease of the sea-born. This time, he considered the beak drawing near and opened his heart to what was to come--the touch the feeling of fingers curling on fingers. He was losing days, losing everything faster than he thought possible. His submariner’s heart knew that death, war, and the nautical looped, a sailor’s knot. He reached out--
And it was in his home, and it was in him.
She built her nest as carefully as he had built hers.
After the diagnosis, he became fascinated with the brevity of a six-to-eighteen-month lifespan.
As a submariner dockside in Okinawa, he strode through the fish, the others, with a young man’s disdain. At the time, he only saw the slime, the xenophobia-inducing suction.
Now, the kinetics compelled him. The cephalopod was a creature of deliberation, and even its name was dignified: it could move fast, but it was made for dying slow.
For fifteen weeks, he immersed himself in the subterranean. He lavished a lover’s care and a chemist’s attention on the tank, one hundred gallons of foreign soil. Nothing prepared him for the day he brought her home. Her arms waved, grace and beauty and the intentional, cruel drawing forth that only the seafloor spawns.
For days, she hid when he came to feed her, leaving behind the cracked-up shells of oysters. Then, one day, he opened the tank to slip in her breakfast, tender crab remnants, and saw her. She slid out, clenching her tentacles as though saying hello.
Over the subsequent weeks, he felt his memories detach like the octopus’s regenerative arms, but he never forgot her. At first, she seldom emerged, like a shy Japanese lady confined to the inner quarters. But, after a time, she would spiral out of her chambers and engage him in a pas de deux. She loved to nudge him arm and dart around the tank, retrieving a toy for him to grapple with her. It was a clever game, a little indulgence, even when he cycled the water of her tank.
But in the allotted time, his frown lines deepened, and she cradled her body as though she ached all over. The beauty of the ocean is in its cruelty and its evocation of the passage of time—at once eternal and ephemeral. Her treats rotted in their shells, and she cherished a new obsession: to build. She shut herself in a den, frantic to fulfill her one urge: to hatch eggs she would never actualize, fragments evanescing into remembered sea-gilt and stardust.
She emerged once again, as the forums predicted. Always, he had let her close without surrendering his humanity, his unease of the sea-born. This time, he considered the beak drawing near and opened his heart to what was to come--the touch the feeling of fingers curling on fingers. He was losing days, losing everything faster than he thought possible. His submariner’s heart knew that death, war, and the nautical looped, a sailor’s knot. He reached out--
And it was in his home, and it was in him.