What did the octopus know? Each day at work, when Alice fed it or cleaned its tank or gave it some item to keep it busy—a rubber dog toy, a teething ring—she wondered. She watched its eight roving arms moving around the enclosure, all independent from whatever was happening in its big, globular head, constantly probing the edges of its existence. Sometimes, as she was going about her day, she caught sight of a limb above the water, reaching out.
“This is my colleague,” Alice would joke, showing off pictures of this alien she spent her days caring for. There had been many octopuses since Alice started at the aquarium. They only lived a few years, so she tried not to get too attached. It helped, at least, that they died predictably. Fading from this world into the next.
Each new octopus came from the wild, collected and shipped to her to live in a grey, windowed box before it went out on exhibit. That was the part she hated most. She wanted to tell it, somehow, that she knew this wasn’t fair, that she would do everything she could to make up for it. But the octopus just stared at her, narrowed eyes accusing her in all that was happening.
It had been two weeks since Alice had been in. She was grateful to the other aquarists who covered for her while she was away. The time off had been unexpected. The morning it happened, she had been alone in the back. It had started as a sharp cramp and, soon, there was blood seeping through her khaki uniform shorts.
In the bathroom, she stuffed her underwear full of flimsy toilet paper. She called her husband and told him to meet her at the hospital. Alice hadn’t been far along, but she had begun to imagine—a wisp of curly hair, two moon-shaped eyes, tiny fingers wrapped around one of her own.
As she walked up to the door, she smiled at the security guy who always let her in before opening. What would she have told him if he’d asked where she’d been? She didn’t want to explain, and she didn’t want apologies. What had happened wasn’t anyone’s fault.
“Hey, Jeremy,” Alice greeted her co-worker as she set down her things at her station. Everything was just how she left it, the notebook still open to her to-do list from that morning and the days on her calendar left un-crossed off. She caught up, with Jeremy’s help, on what she’d missed.
“Before I forget,” Jeremy said, as Alice followed him around, taking stock of what needed doing. “The octopus laid eggs.”
Alice felt her breath catch in her throat. “Oh, fuck,” she said. “I mean, yeah, wow.” The eggs would become nothing. She saw them there in her mind, clusters swaying like willows in the wind.
Senescence, the winding down of life. Here’s where it started. In the weeks that remained, they would let the octopus care for its would-be brood, spending what energy it had left to protect them. When the end was near and the octopus began to look grim, greyed and still, they would move it behind the scenes until it passed.
“I’ll miss her,” Jeremy said with a small shrug. “She was a good one.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “She is.”
She spent the morning avoiding the octopus’s tank. Alice didn’t want to think about what was happening, so she did her best to ignore it.
Finally, she couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to feed it. Alice leaned over the tank, looking down at the octopus far below.
“Hi,” she said toward it, resting her hand on the water’s surface. They could remember faces, Alice had read once. Have favorites, hold grudges. She watched as it clocked her presence, changing its color, shape.
Alice stuck her hand deeper into the cold water, and the octopus started to climb, reaching its way toward her. When it grabbed her arm, she felt, like she always did, a flash of surprise. It was always so much stronger than she was prepared for, latching on and refusing to let go.
This time, instead of carefully plucking off each sucker, wrestling its eight arms with her two, she let it keep going. It coiled itself around her, pulling with all its might. Alice thought, if she let it, the octopus would take her under. She scooped it up with both hands.
It filled her arms as she cradled it closer to her chest. She felt the octopus’s weight, its slimy, writhing, deflated body, and all its contradictions. She wondered how she might extricate herself or explain. But Alice knew then; they both understood.
“You’re okay,” she said, standing there soaking wet, first to herself and then to the octopus, again and again and again.