Finder, Keeper

[Inspired in part by the short story, "On the Banks of the River Lex," by N. K. Jemisin]

Yuletide stared the puffins and penguins in their sad red eyes. Dozens of them had gathered around the chain-link wall of their enclosure, beaks agape. Slowly, Yuletide dipped an arm into the bucket in front of her, scooped up a slew of herring, and presented it to her audience, who responded with several harried squawks. She held the silver, scaly bouquet aloft—which lucky seabird would be the next to wed? One rockhopper’s beak trembled as he watched her raise the fish ever higher; maybe he was the blushing bride-to-be.

Once the clamor started to build, Yuletide pulled her arm back and launched a volley of fish straight at the expectant, screaming birds. The fish hurtled through the air, smacked against the steel of the fence, and tumbled onto the gravel, just centimeters beyond their reach. Her feathery clients stretched their beaks frantically through the square gaps of the fence, snapping at the fish to no avail.

Yuletide gazed blankly at the frenzied flock, then at the bucket of fish to her left. Dragging the pail behind her, she shambled to the fence.

She pushed one of the herring closer. A puffin snatched at it: no dice.

She pushed it closer still; nope.

By the third push, another penguin grabbed the fish. The penguin next to it grabbed onto Yuletide, as did the two on either side. They weren't letting go.

Yuletide pushed away, severing the tip of her arm before the birds could latch on in earnest. She dumped the bucket against the fence and shuffled away, ducking around a corner and vaulting herself over the glass of the tide pool exhibit. Cold washed over her as she unfurled into the gently lapping waves. With one eye, she examined the tip of her wounded arm. From the looks of it, the penguins hadn’t managed to snag much; and even if they had, it’d grow back soon enough. In the meantime, seven healthy arms would have to do.

For now, Yuletide sank to the bottom of the tank, evading the stinging grasp of the anemones, and felt the shade of her skin shift to match the speckled surface of sand. She gazed out at the dry world beyond the tank through flattened pupils, gathering her bearings.

Yuletide didn’t know how long the humans had been gone; she didn’t know whether they were coming back. Yuletide didn’t know that the humans called her “Yuletide.” She simply knew that she was hungry, and that food lay beyond the confines of her tank.

She’d escaped an armful of times before, mostly out of boredom; and every time, Jerell had brought her back, chuckling to himself as he scooped her up into his burly arms.

“I know, beautiful, I know,” he’d coo to her, “there’s a whole world out there to see, and all you got is this tank. Maybe they’ll let me take you out on a walk one of these days, fill up a Radio Flyer with saltwater so you can see the other animals. ‘Til then, you gotta stay on that side of the glass.”

By this time, she’d darkened her hide to match the rich brown of his arms, her suckers gripping him loosely, tasting the salt on his skin, the remnants of fish on his hands. He’d placed her gently back into the water, watching her pirouette into place like the dancer in a music box.

On two occasions, Jerell had reappeared at her tank, holding one hand behind his back. He slapped the surface of the water to pique her focus.

“I got somethin’ for ya, Yules Verne,” he sang, grinning. “How’d you like…s’more dinner?”

From behind his back, he drew a little bucket of sardines, sloshing them around.

“Some of these I gotta take over to the shark tank,” he sighed, “but not all of them. Eat up, gorgeous.”

With that, he tipped the bucket just slightly, letting a small stream of silver cascade into the tank. She snatched each of the sardines up rapidly, flexing her suckers to convey the little fish to her beak. Yuletide curled one of her arms up and out of the water as Jerell walked away.

“I’ll be back,” he assured her with a tip of his hat.

The first time Jerell appeared with unexpected food, the extra meal consumed all her attention. The second time, she focused sharply on his footsteps, the direction of his gait, the trail of the pungent, fishy scent.

The gentle current of the tide pool coaxed Yuletide out of hiding. The wound on her arm had stopped issuing curling wisps of blue blood into the water, and she siphoned her way up to the surface, flinging herself onto the glass. She slithered up and over the edge, landing on the gravel in a heap. The bucket had left a trail of chum between the seabird exhibit and the commissary; she stretched her eight arms out into a compass rose and sniffed for the traces of fish slurry with her myriad suckers….Got it.

Yuletide began sauntering over toward the marshland exhibit. With each trek across the aquarium, she realized anew the hostility of the open air. An octopus could last a good while outside of water, longer than most, probably; but not forever. She’d managed to map out rest stops along the way, and the marshland stop happened to be one of her favorites.

The gravel from the path started sticking to the spaces between her suckers—she picked up the pace. A walker seldom finds a pebble in her shoe to be pleasant. Yuletide had about 2200 hundred shoes.

Most of the other tanks she avoided simply as a matter of course—after a few dismal encounters with predators larger than she, Yuletide seldom dove into tanks without assessing first the ferocity of its contents. She traversed the marshland habitat, ignoring the occasional furry or scaly head that peered out at her from behind a glass wall. Yuletide didn't have time for pleasantries.

Following the scent trail back to the kitchen, she held up an arm to the glass and weeds bordering the farthest exhibits, taste-testing each one as she passed. She couldn’t quite make out the difference between them by sight—not reliably, anyway. Even in water, her nearsightedness blurred anything more than an armspan away. Fortunately for her, milkweed grew along the perimeter of only one enclosure, and its signature scent sailed over the muck and musk.

Yuletide trudged along past a few more tanks, gripping and tasting her surroundings. She was beginning to question her memory when finally a wayward arm coiled absently around a green stalk, tasting and smelling in tandem the scent of honey tinged with vanilla: bingo.

She threw two arms onto the surface of the glass, hoisting herself upward, just as a lilting, piercing cry echoed down from the rafters, growing steadily shriller with each wingbeat.

The hunger came in waves after Jerell and the other humans stopped showing up at the aquarium. Yuletide slammed herself into the glass more than twice, half to grab the attention of phantom passersby, half to distract herself from the aching chasm of an empty gullet. The wolf eel couple in the tank next door neared their shared wall to investigate before sinking back down to the rocky depths of their enclosure; the sheep crabs kept to themselves.

Yuletide dragged herself into the air between the surface of the water and the roof of her enclosure, the ceiling lights blinding and dazzling her as she climbed higher. Her arms palpated the walls for any hint of an opening, her suckers tasting for any promise of escape. She searched until her gills burned for need of water, her muscles buckling, her hearts fluttering. Eventually, she faded from consciousness; and when she came to, water was coursing again through her gills, oxygen seeping through her chalk-white skin.

Again and again, she repeated her ascent, now concentrating on the door through which Eugenie had fed her her last meal. Jerell had once called Yuletide “a treasure; that’s why we gotta keep you locked up like it’s a bank vault”; Yuletide had failed to understand the meaning of his words, though she'd rippled with peachy hues at the gentle sentiment of the sound. She scanned her memory for something she’d missed before, some detail she’d been able to make out beyond the crinkly, funhouse surface of the water. She’d heard, as well as felt, the door thud when Eugenie closed it, but then something subtler…a click.

Yuletide tried to climb the door itself, but some strange, slick coating over the metal denied her any real purchase. She threw two arms catty-cornered in either direction across the wall, another two up at the ceiling, and suspended herself like a squishy tangle of threads on a shining, pulsating loom. The two arms left to dangle swung down to the circular mechanism protruding from the door. She inserted one arm-tip into the narrow gap between the rubber housing and the door, feeling along for movement. She'd opened countless jars and containers of human make by this point, and so applied the same principle to the door: pry until it comes loose.

Her suckers met with galvanized steel plates, all screwed into place, all resisting her touch; and then, as her arm stretched into the tiny cavity, still pushing and elongating blindly through the innards of the door, her suckers caught hold of something. As she flexed each ring of muscle, fixing it into place, she pushed harder still, her mantle flashing white and maroon with the effort.

At first, nothing came of it, and Yuletide paused for a moment, her gills gasping for water, her arms hanging slack like power lines on a hot day. She kept at it, inserting another arm into the slot alongside the first, pushing all the while; until finally, almost imperceptibly, the metal within began to grind and groan into motion. The inertia of the wheel reinvigorated her; she poured all of her strength into her twinned arms, into the door.

As Yuletide's body began to spasm, her skin growing pale, her suckers losing their hold,

Click.

The slab of steel shifted with a hollow, metallic grunt. Stubbornly, glacially, the door creaked open.

The white terror careened past Yuletide as she clung to the side of the marshland tank, its flashing yellow beak not quite tearing into her hide, but definitely grating her nerves. Other gulls had harried her before, mostly in passing, deterred eventually by her size—this one was bold, truly a shitbird.

Her assailant dove past repeatedly, closing in with each swipe. At first, Yuletide started to cower, trying to blend in with her surroundings; but camouflage doesn't really include a setting for "aquarium glass." The cold of panic began to seep through her blood, followed immediately by a searing surge of rage. Her skin flushed a deep mahogany before darkening to purple-black.

The seagull let out another rattling war cry, ripping at her with its beak, drawing drops of her blue blood; and Yuletide ripped back. Four arms whipped out at the bird, wrapping around feet, wings, neck; the gull devolved into thrashing twists and sputtering squeaks as she pulled herself with her free arms to the apex of the glass wall. She teetered on the edge a moment, the gull suspended behind her like a wretched parachute, and tossed her full weight into the water below.

Gulps and splashes, screeches and slaps filled the air as Yuletide rolled over the gull, extending the webbing between her arms to blanket the bird and force it further underwater. Its head broke the surface of the water momentarily; but soon choking turned to gurgling, to bubbling, and then to nothing as the lump of feathers in Yuletide's grasp stopped flapping. Slowly, she released her hold on the gull, watching as it floated face-down through the duckweed.

Yuletide floated back to the wall of the tank, hanging by her suckers from the glass, and peered over at the log on the opposite side of the enclosure. Cool gray eyes had watched her righteous battle from atop the log with something between disinterest and amusement; the struggle done and the victor declared, the wrinkled log-sitters had accordioned their heads back into their necks and resumed basking. "Turtles gonna turt’," as Eugenie would say.

With one lazy arm, Yuletide pulled the carcass of the seagull closer to her, prodding its chest, tasting the prickled skin with her suckers. She unraveled her own beak and set to work.

Yuletide darted around the aquarium, as fast and as far as her arms would carry her. On the first day alone, she taunted the dolphins and sea lions from behind the glass; she swam in contemplative silence with the sea turtles and manta rays; she scooped up rock crabs two at a time, chomping their innards into bits; and she marveled at the jellies, watching their blown-glass tentacles drift and swirl.

In time, the memory of Jerell returned to her—his footsteps echoing from down the hall, his hands still fresh with the scent of fish. She still wondered where he might be—and maybe a few of the other humans, sure. More to the point, though, she wondered where the hell he got those fish. She took her winding route back to her old tank, climbed up the wall, and slipped through the door, plopping back into the water.

She sank to the rocks at the bottom of her tank, retracing her steps, and gazed across at the tank to her left. The wolf eels, a male and female, usually swam up to the glass when they heard her return to her tank; this time, no greeting came. Yuletide ambled over to the sidewall, looking through into the wolf eels’ home. It took her a moment to spot them, but there they lay, one around the other, motionless but for the opening and closing of their mouths and gills. They’d coiled around a heap of something…tiny balls of marbled gray. Yuletide backed away from the glass, her skin suffused with oranges and whites.

She shuffled over to the other side of her tank, to the sheep crabs. They lay huddled in a corner of their tank as well. Yuletide watched as they sat, legs and claws folded in on themselves, unmoving. Behind a strand of kelp, one sheep crab, smaller than the others, caught her eye. She stared at it more closely before realizing that it was missing a leg—no, two legs…and no pinchers….She looked back at the crabs in the corner, taking in the little specks of white floating in their midst, and dangling from one crab’s sideways, bubbling mouth, a ragged shred of white meat.

Yuletide siphoned back up to the surface of the water, climbing out past her door and into the hallway that ran behind the tanks. She walked with quick, powerful strides—as powerful as her arms would allow—back to the main corridor. She’d only ever gotten this far before, whenever Jerell had found her. She thought back to one of her favorite escapes, along with a memory of her second-favorite human.

“Please don’t tell me Yuletide got out again,” chuckled María from the doorway.

“Okay,” replied Jerell, smiling as he held Yuletide up for her to see. “I won’t tell you Yuletide got out again.”

They both laughed at that, and María wheeled around and sauntered back into the smell of frozen fish and soap and drain pipes and

The kitchen.

Yuletide hacked another bite out of the seagull, making unbroken eye contact with the boldest of the turtles. They'd blinked a few times at the occasional burst of blood from her quarry, but mostly they basked. Yuletide stopped at the turtle tank when she needed a break—the scaly little goblins forced her to relax.

She snipped off one last chunk of bird meat, taking a moment to admire the flurry of feathers she’d left behind, and vaulted once again over the side of the tank, rappelling down from two of her arms to the gravel path below. She scuttled the rest of the short distance to the main building, climbing up the wall, slipped through the bathroom window, and hurrying through the swinging door and down the hall.

She flopped past the threshold and into the smorgasbord of smells that marked the kitchen. Herring, clams, cubes of algae, nutrition bars, krill: all of them spread out on the counter, thawing, waiting beside their assortment of buckets and bowls.

Yuletide took a dip in her pail of saltwater by the door, feeling the pebbles and grit wash away from her skin, her arms slumping over the sides, her gills breathing in deep.

Time to get to work.

Once Yuletide figured out the door handles on the refrigerators, the wealth of the commissary opened up to her: shrimp, anchovies, crabs, gross little green nuggets made out of god-only-knew-what. Even some not-so-fresh lettuce peeked out from one of the bins, though Yuletide didn't recognize it immediately as food.

She cheerily filled a bucket up with mackerel from the freezer, taking the occasional break to let the numbness in her suckers wear off, and shuffled back to her tank with her haul.

Yuletide set the bucket down and started to climb back up to her door; but before she reached it, a serpentine shape sidled up to the wall of glass. The male wolf eel hovered there like a toothy, unflattering reflection, an anti-Narcissus, eyes fixed on the bucket full of fish.

Yuletide regarded the he-eel, and then the mackerel, and then the she-eel with their mound of spawn, then the he-eel, and then the mackerel again.

God, those things were ugly.

And GOD, she was gonna need a bigger bucket.