Pearlasia dozed in her sponge bed for the rest of the day, with Amphitrite praying over her. The princess would periodically wake up, alarmed, and feel a stranger’s hand brushing against her face, only to realize it was her own. She could hear Amphitrite’s voice, urging her to breathe, just breathe.
Pearlasia finally came to lucidity late in the afternoon. She found Amphitrite and Isis sitting beside her. Isis smiled and placed a warm towel on Pearlasia’s forehead before exiting to give the daughter and mother some space. In silence, Amphitrite took Pearlasia’s hands into hers. It felt reassuring, to Pearlasia, to have her mother nurture her.
It had been almost a decade since Amphitrite last held her hand without smacking it away. Like Isis, Pearlasia recalled, Amphitrite was allergic to feelings. At least, the kind Pearlasia needed right now. It was ironic to Pearlasia how most commoners found her mother so sentimental and kind. Mermaids were drawn to Amphitrite’s relatability, while men and children deemed her the perfect combination of witty and charming. When Amphitrite was good, she was very good. Yet, somehow, that goodness never trickled down to her own family.
Now that Pearlasia had her mother so close, she refused to complain. She didn’t want to let go. Breathing easily, Pearlasia noticed the hiccups were gone. Relieved, she tried to sit up, but Amphitrite pressed her back down, gently. “Unlike a merman,” her mother explained, “the natural horizontal position of a mermaid is precariously balanced between birth and death. You should remain on your back until it all passes through.” Amphitrite explained further that Pearlasia’s position, laying down, helped relieve pressure.
“What’s inside of me?” Pearlasia’s mind skipped to the worst. “Am I going to die?”
“You could, but I won’t let that happen,” Amphitrite reassured her. Pearlasia started to cry. “Pearlasia, you’re a fully-developed mermaid now, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. The hiccups, the blood, the pain happens to all royal females. The depth of the ocean puts enormous pressure on a mermaid’s body as it matures. And if the gas bubbles release any other way, it could cause a life-threatening embolism. By not coming to me immediately, you put yourself at a considerable risk of bleeding out.”
“It’s not like you ever told me about any of this,” Pearlasia snapped. Even her tutor had skipped the talk.
“I thought I would have more time, as royal blood normally comes a few years after your monthlies,” Amphitrite confessed. “But like everything with you, you’re always a tad too early.” Amphitrite pinched her fingers to a smidge, just a tad. “I swear, even when I was a month in, you’d find the worst ways to tease me, with your kicking and bouncing. My lips would purse into this crazy figure eight, then an awful whistle came cackling, and my alarm bells would ring off!” At least, that’s how Amphitrite remembered it.
***
Amphitrite narrated that on that day, nearly fourteen years ago, the water was extremely frigid for early spring. A late winter storm crowded the surface with icebergs. Sun wouldn’t shine through Atlantica again until the ice melted in autumn that year. “Blocks and slabs, the size of buildings, were everywhere!” Amphitrite described excitedly. Within those milky waters, there was something lovely about the ice islands. “As I’d get close to the dazzling white behemoths, they’d reflect off my rising belly like a prism of diamonds.” Amphitrite would stare into an iceberg every day for good luck. Then one morning, her image no longer refracted. Her count must have been off. Amphitrite wasn’t expecting to release her egg for another month or so. Yet subconsciously, that was when Amphitrite knew that it was time.
Later, Amphitrite put on a gilded cowrie choker for good health and protection as a mother-to-be. On the one hand, she shared, it was an incredible gift to bear another child. On the other hand, she was experiencing a difficult pregnancy and would love nothing more than to spit her larva out already. Amphitrite felt selfish bringing another child into this cruel, unforgiving, glorious sea — let alone a daughter.
She knew that the burden a future queen must endure in meeting a kingdom’s demands would never let up. No one ever told Amphitrite how exhausting it would all be. She was glad to have this time alone to tell Pearlasia the truth. “The worst job you can give to a mermaid is that of a queen.” It didn’t make sense to Pearlasia. “Soon enough, you’ll see.”
Amphitrite remembered Isis ogling at her with skepticism in regard to the gender reveal. “You have no way of knowing if it’s a boy or girl,” Isis said, while escorting Amphitrite to the nearest breeding cave. But Amphitrite felt certain.
Inside the cave, gleaming-white teardrops, the size of hands, suspended from coagulated beads up on the ceiling. There were hundreds of mermaid’s purses, transparent egg cases of future mermaids and mermen. Elderly mermaids, known as purse snatchers, who lived and worked at breeding sites sat with their backs pressed firmly to the walls. They were constantly on guard, with their necks craned, as they waited for eggs to hatch. When Amphitrite announced herself, in her beautiful singsong cadence, the purse snatchers’ ears perked up. Never had a royal figure, or any figure, come to that cave.
One purse snatcher rose from her stance and propelled over to them. She gave Amphitrite a bundle of sea grapes. “Chew them all and swallow, or else the pain will be intolerable.” Squeamishly, Amphitrite plopped a grape in her mouth and slowly chewed. It tasted gross, she recounted, like a mixture of black licorice and vinegar.
Then, the purse snatcher said a prayer for good luck. Nothing happened at first. Finally, a colossal belch erupted from Amphitrite’s throat and the cave filled with her foul stench. She interrupted the burp with a coughing fit, spitting out a mixture of dark blue amniotic fluid. Then a shock of pain sent Amphitrite down to her hands and knees. The purse snatcher shouted encouraging platitudes, none of which Amphitrite cared to comprehend. She tried to curse, but with every attempt of lashing her tongue, her throat tightened more.
The queen gripped harder to the cowry shells as her stomach compressed and expanded. Isis grabbed her hair as she vomited some more, and this time the fluid was tinged with her blood. In it, the elder spotted a mermaid’s purse. Amphitrite caught a glimpse of her embryo, with the same black markings as she and her mother. “You were right,” Isis admitted. “It must be a girl.” Isis wiped away thickening blood from Amphitrite’s crimson-stained smile. In that moment, Amphitrite finally understood the complexity of motherhood. “It felt like being stung by a blow, and then I was mesmerized,” Amphitrite told Pearlasia. As the queen continued to share her daughter’s birth story, Pearlasia could sense a bond forming between them. She would do anything to please her mother — at any cost.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
***
Hundreds of feet above, in a pocket-sized cave, a wonderpus octopus named Wynter stacked clamshells at the entrance. She squeezed her beige and rust-colored arms through the tiny opening. Then, Wynter flattened her bulbous body and vanished inside. Like Amphitrite, but fourteen years later, she too was a mommy-to-be. But, unlike mermaids, most octopuses never got a chance to bond with their future spawn. For Wynter, there was no time like the present.
Now with the temperature just right, lukewarm but not terribly hot, Wynter expelled her eggs, one by one, around the cave. Her gelatinous eggs, each the size of a grain of rice, floated freely about the den. Wynter estimated there must be thousands of them.
Nearly three days went by before she had gathered all her eggs into groups and stitched them to the ceiling. Wynter swept her suckers gently over every egg, counting them off as she tired herself into a deep slumber. “One egg, two eggs…”
“…Eleven-thousand, six-hundred and eighty-nine.” Having glued about seventy-five braids to the roof, there she rested, right under her octo-spawn.
Little time passed before Wynter’s reddish-brown complexion turned gray, then off-white, and finally translucent. The end had to be near, she thought. Her stretchy skin had long withered and wrinkled to the point where she weighed half her pre-baby weight. When she wasn’t crying, Wynter pondered on her short life of four years. On lessons she didn’t learn from her mother that she wished she had. On the one guy who creeped into her life and left just as haphazardly as he appeared. She tried to forget about the starvation aspect of hibernating that no one warned her about. Wynter would kill for a crab or two right now. Her stomach rumbled constantly. Stop that!
She tried to block hunger pangs from her mind, even as her body deteriorated from the lack of nutrients. A few more hours. You can get through this, she told herself. She had to remain tranquil to conserve her little energy left. All her vitality was consumed by observing and protecting her young, day in and day out. As Wynter clung onto life, an egg began to crack.
It was less of a hatch and more of gentle plop as the first larva wiggled its arms and ripped the egg case wide open. Then, other tiny octopuses slinked out headfirst, propelled forward by their stubby arms. Wynter marveled at their delicate blue and transparent bodies with visible red brains. They were so alien, yet so familiar. Did I look like that once?
Her bolder, more ambitious children pulsated out from the cave, still dragging around attached egg yolks with them. Some lingered behind to help release their more reserved counterparts. As they departed, Wynter spiraled her arms into a wave, but not one of her hatchlings waved back. She bent into a corkscrew and got small, visibly distraught. That’s when she noticed one capsule, unmoving, amidst the tattered, empty cases. Maybe the little one didn’t survive. Then, slowly, it began to stretch.
She hummed a soft lullaby, a song Wynter heard her mother sing when she left the den, “A Song for You.” Her final larva eased out. He shot into Wynter’s arms, and she reluctantly embraced him. She was careful not to squeeze too tight. “I will name you Octavious,” she proclaimed. Then, Wynter grew quiet, unsure if an octopus should ever name a larva it may never see again. Still, she called herself Wynter, even though she had never formally introduced herself to anyone.
Octavious climbed on her mantle and pushed upon his eight arms, ever so serious. “And what’s your name?” he asked. He saw a pain behind her eyes, although he was too young to understand.
“Call me nothing,” she choked out.
Octavious asked again, confused.
Wynter’s restraint snapped, and she cried out, “I’m Nothing!”
Before Octavious could respond, Wynter drew the water from her body cavity into a punchy stream. The blow swiftly forced Octavious out of her den.
He drifted up and away into the thick, algae-infused soup until he neared a bustling coral reef. As his eyes adjusted to the surging waves, wonders of a distant world emerged. Up there, sunlight pierced the top of the water and sent it all glittering in a blue and silver luster. “Bye, Nothing!” he yelled.
He launched up into the first thousand feet of the water column, known as the Epipelagic Zone. Here, there was no sense of scale or perspective. Like everywhere in the ocean, light appeared slow and jagged as Octavious navigated the ocean’s distorted, magnified shapes.
He reached the peak of an expansive seamount, an ancient underwater volcanic mountain. Out on the apex, his new home at the edge of Atlantica teemed with activity and life wherever he looked: ebony brittle stars, purple urchins, frosted glass sponges, and myriad rockfish. Corals grazed on a giant sugar kelp forest that kissed the water’s surface. Feuding microscopic seahorses strangled each other, for play and for foe, with their tails. Pearl fish, which lived in sea cucumber’s anuses, got cozy in their excrement during the day and hunted for tiny larvae like Octavious at night.
Each moment for the hours-old octopus brimmed with adventure. He escaped the feathery thoracic limbs of a barnacle. He dodged hungry tube-nosed seabirds like shearwaters and petrels. Bobbie worms, with pincers wide open, pounced on unsuspecting larvae, but not on Octavious, for he was too slick. At night, polyps would swell and feed on passing plankton, the diverse microscopic organisms that sparkled in the sea.
At first, Octavious lived off the egg yolk from which he hatched. Then, he expanded his palate to smaller plankton. When it appeared safe, Octavious collected algae from the reef’s surface. He even made a few friends by playing hide and seek with other larvae.
Alas, a few days after during the first full moon of the spring, more creatures arrived to prey upon all the little hatchlings in the sea. This was a special time in the season. Almost all species of coral synchronized their spawning over a few nights once a year. Billions of pink gametes germinated from the mouths of coral polyps simultaneously and drifted down the water column like pink-hued marine glitter. It was magical for Octavious to witness their release firsthand. Larvae of crab, flounder, sea elephants, and other species also contributed to this hodgepodge. They were too weak to swim against currents and too small to withstand pressure at deeper layers, so they drifted, far and wide, trying their best to avoid the grip of dinoflagellate’s flagella and plants’ feeding tentacles that hovered around. Determined to escape the mayhem, Octavious hopped on one of the gamete’s tails and wafted along.