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Cephalopod
by Alexei Kalinchuk I met her in a bar that discouraged red-hatted festive drinkers in favor of drunken packs of off-duty Santa Clauses from the nearby downtown. A tourist, I decided when she entered this dark place. I beelined her way. Loneliness made me direct. She taught biology at a community college, she said, before rabbit-holing into her childhood during her second vodka. “I didn’t have a dog or cat. My parents were academics. I had an octopus and another tank full of tropical fish.” This remark shut down my game for the moment. “I used to love bringing friends home to see my animals.” Then the fish started disappearing from their tank. So she asked her mother did the fish die and get flushed. Her mother said no, ask your father. Her father said no, ask your mother. While they used to be a close family, now they only gathered for holidays, or at silent dinners. “I knew part of why I was a kid with weird pets was they wanted to distract me from seeing how much they hated each other.” I decided she was newly divorced and adjusting to a first Christmas alone in the city. How could I distract her from the past? Hah, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be in this bar either. The case of missing fish went unsolved. “Like Santa Claus,” she said, eyeing the drunks at the bar. And as a busy, nervous child, she couldn’t devote time to solving the mystery. Going between her parents with questions about missing costly pets might only annoy them. Not a behavior that earned Christmas gifts. “We all want to wake up to a gift,” I said, smiling. That Christmas morning they all woke up to a hellish smell. “While we were opening every window, all of us still in our bedclothes, that’s when I found out what happened to my fish.” An octopus can breathe out of water, she said, for limited periods. Hers did too, of course. It also craved more fish, apparently raiding the nearby tank periodically. When it ran out of prey, on Christmas Eve, it did the only thing it could do. It went hunting. It climbed out of its tank, then waddled down the hallway hungry, until it reached the area under the Christmas tree where it died. Nose wrinkling from the stench, her father grabbed a black trash bag to dispose of Ollie. “After that,” she sipped her drink, frowned, “...they bought me one last pet - a beagle - then my parents split up.” “So, happy ending,” I said, hoping she’d concentrate on how close we were sitting, my game restarting. “You got a dog.” “He ran away.” Then she excused herself to use the bathroom. I waited for her, but after a while, I decided she was as gone as those fish. My realization birthed laughter, laughter became a chortle, then something more seasonal. “Ho-ho-ho!” After a band of bloodshot Kris Kringles glared at me from their seats at the bar, I stopped. |
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