Fifty-two Pickup part 1: The Lovers

Ch: 1 An Octopus’ Garden

I’m not sure if you can hear me… or if we’re really communicating in this… situation, but neither one of us has any pressing engagements for a while. Perhaps this will be easier if you just sit back and listen, the dead really do have all the best stories… and we do enjoy sharing them.

My story didn’t really start beneath this crystal blue sky, I just sorta, found myself here, one sunny morning, but we’ll get to that. We are going to be together for some little time, I think.

I slowly drifted, relaxed and at peace with all the world, contemplating the start of a journey. Blue tinted clouds shimmered and swayed overhead, while the shadows of sea birds flitted by, their pale white bodies invisible through the waves that rippled between sea and sky.

The gentle roar of surf breaking on the reef’s windward side soothed me, as the warm, still waters of the shallows danced in the gentle breeze that I was probably never going to feel on my skin…

I reflected on this life, while floating there, my tentacles waving in the gentle current as I drifted. ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this…’ I muttered to myself.

‘Like what?’ Emmie asked me, as I nearly jumped out of my mucus coating in surprise. ‘You’re always off alone, Gary… come play with us! We’re playing hide and sneak among the anemone!’

‘Maybe later, I’ve got some things to think about…’ I noticed the way her bright blue rings darkened and her usually cheerful yellow color washed out, from her mantle to her tentacle tips; that was no fair. ‘I’m sorry Emmie… I’ll come play with you, for a little while.’

Her colors immediately brightened, as she entangled one of her tentacles with one of mine. ‘Come on, everyone’s waiting!’

She got so excited that a drop of ink escaped, as she squirted us along toward the meadow of anemone and fan corals, where the sea grass grew long and lush. She blushed a pretty amethyst color across all her rings, when she realized what she’d done… and that I’d seen.

‘I’m… just excited…’ She stuttered, flashing a few unintended shades in her embarrassment and distress. ‘You hardly ever play with us, firstborn…’ She whispered, her rings still a subtle shade of violet.

‘I wish you would spend more time with me… And all the others!’ She stammered, becoming just a little spotty and green, as she tried to backpedal from her almost confession. I watched as she shook herself all over and firmed up her colors.

“Gary, I like you… I have a brood cave already picked out… if you’d like to come see it… with… me?”

I’d lived eighteen years as a human man… and this was my first love confession. Not just my first from an octopus. She was cute, sweet, funny and so charming… and for some reason, she wanted me… But there was a huge but, butting its way into the scene.

‘Emmie, I like you very much and I consider you my closest friend…’ I said in colors and patterns that were too muted for anyone else to ‘hear’. ‘But I won’t be your mate, nor anyone else's… I can’t.’

She stopped dead in the water,looking at me, her colors swirling wildly. ‘You know I’m not like you, not like the others, Emmie… You’re beautiful and sweet, but I can’t be your mate.’ I whispered as gently as I could.

‘I can’t be anyone’s mate… You’ll find someone who can fertilize your egg cluster, someone who can stay and watch your children hatch with you.’

‘But… you like me! I know you do!’ She sobbed, dashing into my many arms and gripping me in a very tangly hug. ‘I like you too! I don’t think it’s weird that you were born last season… Stay with me. Be mine… please?’

It burned me like I’d been washed up on shore and salted down, as I carefully untangled the knot she’d tied us in. ‘Emmie… I wasn’t born at the end of last season. I was born at the beginning of your grandmother’s season.” I whispered as gently as I could.

“I watched Sandi grow, learn, and live. I was there when she met Brent, your grandfather… and I watched as your mother and her siblings were born; while Sandi passed on to join her ancestors… Just as Stella did, when you hatched. And as you will, in a few months, when your brood swims free into this reef, continuing the endless cycle of life… Without me.’

‘Impossible…’ She scoffed, turning a stoney gray to let me know just how furious she was with me. ‘That would make you three years old!’ She continued to float there in the sunny waters of the atoll, waiting for me to confess that I was full of cormorant shit.

‘I’m not one of the blue rings; not really, Emmie. I’m a different kind of creature entirely, stuffed into this body, somehow.’ I shrugged, it’s a useful, all purpose gesture, when you have as many shoulders as I do.

‘I’m a human man, or I was… Humans are a kind of hairless monkey… Gross, I know… But Emmie, I lived and died already, and somehow, someway, I wound up… here. Like this.’ I said with the most muted colors I could manage.

‘I don’t understand any of that, Gary… But I know you care about me and I know you like me…’ She sobbed. ‘Could you… try? Try being with me?’

‘I can’t… I have something I need to do, I need to get out of the sea, back on land and be who I was meant to be… I’m not sure how, or even what that would look like, but I have to try.’ I explained carefully.

‘Something is calling me, something out there, above the waves…’ I stroked her mantle gently, smoothing her slime coating as I said what had to be said.

‘I have to go, Emmie. I need to leave the atoll and find what I’m looking for… out past the deeps.’

She flashed slate gray all over, as I mentioned my plan to break the ultimate taboo. ‘No…’ She gasped in shades of sickly orange, when she could master her voice again, her pigment cells still shifting colors at the edges of her patterns. ‘You can’t!’

‘I have to.’ I sighed. ‘And I’m leaving now. You’ve all grown up so fine and strong, but I have to leave you now. We’ll never meet again, Emmie.’ I began to jet away, as she sobbed at the edge of the lagoon, watching me go.

‘I’ll remember you Emmie, when you’re with your ancestors, holding tentacles with a male who’s worthy of fathering your brood.’

I never saw her again after that, she faded into the distance, left behind like I’d left so many of her friends, siblings… and the whole community I’d been reborn into.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

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I swam up and over the breakwater, where the water ran deep and cold. The blue ringed octopus people never hunted beyond the rim of the coral atoll, they stayed inside the protected lagoon throughout their entire lives, guided by the race memories of their ancestors… Those fond and hazy memories and gentle spirit guides kept octopus society stable, tranquil and so very safe, predictable… and boring.

Apparently I featured in them now too, remembered by the grandparents and parents of the current population… Remembered as a weirdo who never took a mate and faded from the Akashic record after failling to produce progeny… only to reappear, when the next generation hatched.

Those memories, which I had no access to, guided every moment of my contemporaries’ lives; while I’d had to coax and cajole the others into sharing what they thought everyone ‘just knew’ by instinct.

My ‘race memories’ were the memories of my human life… My human time was short and ended badly, but it was mine and I wanted another chance.

I had watched in horrified fascination, as at the end of my first year in the lagoon, living the life aquatic; all of my friends paired up and began the ancient ritual of procreation...

Without access to their shared racial memories, none of the octopus ladies were even able to perceive me as a potential mate… thankfully.

Like every red blooded nerd and weeaboo, I’d encountered tentacle porn; back when I’d been human. Now that I was also all tentacular and feeling deeply alien, I had no interest in any… brooding behaviors.

It came as a shock anyway, watching all my friends slowly waste away, their lives spent in the ultimate act of survival, spawning a huge brood of adorable little squiggly rascals… The little turds were so cute and I saw their parents in so many of them. I became ‘uncle Gary’... The mysterious ‘firstborn’ who they all met on their first day, wide eyed with awe and wonder.

I watched over them for their entire lives, all four seasons of it, guiding the community in my own way… and having no luck at all. My friends’ kids paired up as the storms of summer passed and the cycle began anew, while I watched, heartbroken again.

While the new kids were excitedly squirting around among my tentacles, spraying each other with ink and giggling I decided. I had to go… after these cute little assholes were grown up.

The blue rings were clever, funny, smart, deeply inquisitive and very peaceful… but they had no drive or ambition; zero, nada.

They possessed no desire to see what lay beyond the atoll, nor to even fully explore the lagoon and its surrounding waters…

They crafted nothing, had no written language and relied entirely on their racial memories to function as a society… I still loved the squishy little jerks, though.

On the outer reef, I gathered the tough, rigid sea straw grasses, each strand of the springy fiber snipped off with my beak. Carefully, I began knotting them, bending, and weaving the fibers into a wicker ball.

In the crevices and shoals on the outside, prey was beyond plentiful, I slowly crept from one fissure or crack to another, my camouflage perfectly matched to the stones and coral.

With a sudden spurt from my vent, I snatched up a wandering anchovy and stung it with just a taste of my venom.

I tucked the paralyzed fish into my newly fashioned cage, it would recover and live… until I got hungry on my journey.

Soon I had a full basket, all the provisions I could carry for my trip across the waves, over the endless abyss. I may have dribbled a little ink into the water myself, contemplating the eternal waves.

I mustered my courage, spurred on by the sure knowledge that I would have to watch sweet, funny Emmie mate and then slowly die… and that I would never be able to abandon her children, or her childrens’ children…

Being eaten by a sea monster would be far better than life as the eternal weirdo and outsider, watching his friends live and die every year… for who knows how long.

In the open sea, above unknown depths, it wasn’t so bad. I squirted along a few yards under the surface, towing my bait cage with relative ease… It produced a lot of drag and if the fish inside got excited it was a little unmanageable, but otherwise there was nothing to eat out in the blue water.

It took two full days and long moonless nights to finally reach shallow water again, soft sandy shoals and a long reef, around an actual island, with trees and wildlife!

Even better, another island, even larger was nearby and another in the distance; looming from the sea, covered in jungle.

I Stared in excitement and wonder, there were new fishes, shellfish, shore birds wading at the water’s edge and even a few monkeys… or something like monkeys, gibbering in the trees.

That’s when it hit me… among the blue rings, I was pretty big. At least half again bigger than any other example I’d met… I was stronger too, and a much faster swimmer. In blue ring society, I was a formidable anomaly, in every way. Out here, though…

I dashed forward, spurting a cloud of ink on pure instinct, some primitive part of my brain had seen the long, gray green menace stalking me from a narrow crevice in the coral.

Searing pain lanced through me, as a part of one of my tentacles was snipped off by the jaws of the most hideous and dastardly looking moray eel I’d ever seen.

I doused him with another shot of ink, while diving fast for the bottom, just a few yards away… He stayed on my tentacle tips the whole way down, his jaws barely parted, waiting to gulp me in if I faltered.

I dipped around a fan coral, through a stag and into a narrow gap between two brain corals. The ugly guy had to slow down to squizzle his way between those two big, round immovable bastards… While I zipped through, and shot the last of my ink, just after I made a head fake to the left.

As my ink clouded the water, I opened all my tenties, spread my mantle and hit the brakes hard. I grabbed the lower curve of my good buddy, the stone brain and pulled myself down low, into its shadow. A quick color shift and the rest was up to luck.

The eel was superheated about missing me so many times, cranky over getting inked and feeling sick, so when he slipped through the gap, he never knew what hit him…

Quick hint, it was me. I shot out and stung him, right in his… or her cloaca, frankly I didn’t care.

My venom is a quick acting paralytic… and it Hurts. It hurts a lot. The nasty stuff came frontloaded with a potent neurotoxin, a bunch of neurotransmitters to amplify the pain and finally a long acting soporific. All blue rings are venomous and poisonous… I just seemed to be an outlier there too, my stuff was super potent and really nasty.

Every once in a while, a large predator would try and snack on the colony, whether a barracuda washed in during a storm or some other hungry beast from the outside… Even the littlest and weakest of us were a match for those rare threats to our home…

The eel was outclassed and already doomed, the tiny morsel of my tentacle in his guts was already slowing him down, as my toxic mucus and poisonous flesh began wreaking havoc inside. Once I got a drop of venom in him, it was game over.

My elation died quickly, when I noticed the large number of hungry mouths lurking in the area. Pug ugly was loosely coiled on the seafloor, rigid and oddly tangled, enjoying the full flavor and rich umami of my venom, as it short circuited the thing’s tiny brain.

That was a nice thought, but I had bigger concerns, or rather a horde of smaller, hungry problems and not enough solutions to go around.

Out on the sandy bottom, among the brain corals and sponges, there were no handy crevices to slip into… and these fish looked like they were blissfully unaware of my toxicity.

With few options left, I slipped into the place I had been trying to avoid; inside mister Moray’s munchy mouth hole. The locals knew that big bastard and wanted no part of him, at least until they were sure he wasn’t just sleeping.

The scent of blood and stress in the water kept drawing more and more interested parties, so I waited there, until my shelter started to stir and wake from his nightmare. It took no effort to send him back ‘round the merry-go round, but the locals were beginning to wonder if they should take a bite and see what happens.

I started looking around in my shitty, toothy cave, looking for anything that might be helpful, his head was big and hefty… But I was surely going to get rooted out, once they realized he was not a threat and started chowing down.

That’s when it struck me… His head, his skull.

I slithered to the back of his mouth and started feeling around, there had to be a way inside…

It was a slow and messy job, but there weren’t many other demands on my time, and I was hungry… Getting into the skull proved no problem, I found a spot under his left eye and used my beak to do what beaks are for.

The problem was the bastard’s brain. It was big, comparatively; and I needed to clear enough space to hide out, without making any openings that could be used to pull me out.

That meant I had to eat it. I was always a big eater, since becoming an octopus. I was always hungry and could munch down a whole smelt and still go looking for shad.

Sadly the challenge of consuming an entire eel brain was just too much. I started off with the big meaty section, enjoying the flashes of electric shocks and weird sensations I got with every bite and nibble. Before long the weird sensations started to make sense; they were memories. Alien, stupid and primitive, just flashes of hunger, excitement and fear…

The more I consumed, the more completely the ideas and sensations took shape, becoming a part of my experiences. I was learning, a little at a time, what it meant to be a moray eel. At the same time, I was expanding my mind and growing my sense of what it meant to be Gary.

Gary the octopus… Gary the man and now, Gary the moray eel. I blacked out at that point, stunned and confused by the presence of an alien set of instincts, instincts that wanted to take charge.

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I fell forever into blackness and silence, and awoke to something I’d begun to believe was only a dream… Music.

Journey was playing from the stereo, dad was driving and mom was up front, singing along with Grandpa, who was in the back seat, with me.

Don’t Stop Believin’ was the track… and it brought tears to my eyes, even though I knew this was a dream. It was a memory, from the week after my fourteenth birthday, the night my life ended in noise, light and pain.

A nightmare I’d had again and again, as though to remind me where I really came from.

When the overloaded big rig came crashing through the oleander that night and hit us head on, everything changed, especially me.

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