Aquarina

A cephalopod creature bleeds her blackness through oceans for a reason. When she is afraid, senses danger, her ink provides a place to hide long enough to achieve an escape from actual or perceived danger.

Aquarina, the name given to her by her captor, had known – had counted on – this when she decided to become an octohuman.

She had been living on land, in her saltbox house nestled alongside the furious Atlantic Ocean when the thought came to her. She was soaking in her claw-footed bathtub, charcoal bath salts cloaking her in purity and warmth, clouding her flesh-and-bone limbs in perfection. She knew in that moment that she was a pseudomorph, a sea witch trapped in a false human form. Then, as she submerged her head in the dark pool, she remembered what brought her to this self-created, underwater catacomb.

A mother was lost and a child was borne from her. Aquarina’s energy and self-love had been expended by grieving and celebrating and giving. She had lost herself, and her capacity for self-love , somewhere along the way.

As the toxins were drawn from the tips of her fingers and toes, she felt so very light and rose from her watery tomb. She held the sides of the antique tub and slowly lifted herself up and out, stepping onto a plush green towel and then to the bathroom sink. She stared at the mirrored medicine cabinet before her, robed in her self-imposed ink and life’s seine net, her long dark hair clinging to her breasts. She listened to the plipp …plipp … plipp sound of muddied grey water slowly dripping over the linoleum floor. A soft roar emanated from her gazing specular reflection.

In a trance, she walked down the wooden stairs of her house, leaving a shimmering trail of inky water behind her. Without putting on clothes or shoes, she headed straight out the front door. She passed the sheets and quilts hung on the clothesline, clapping fervently in the wind, urging her on. Once she reached the end of the property, she effortlessly climbed down the boulders of the small embankment to the rocky beach below, as if she had done it a hundred times, and drew her last breaths of air.

The cold wind and salt spray stung her skin, but it did not overpower the inviting, cushiony feel of the seaweed squishing under her feet. And then, without any hesitation, she melded into the ocean as each of her limbs, hot and tickling, divided into two, and stretched out like rubber bands. Her new appendages then birthed suckers on her newly tough skin. She was miraculously transformed. Thrusting herself through the crashing waves, she was finally free.

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A few days later, after taking a much-needed rest after her metamorphosis, Aquarina found herself being jolted awake by a diver in a wetsuit, shining a bright flashlight in her face. She spewed her ink immediately and propelled, but gasped as she felt a huge tug, realizing she had already been caught. She thrashed about, but now her long hair became tangled in front of her face, and between her tentacles. She felt herself lifted from the salt water, and was very quickly transported into what appeared to be, behind her curtain of hair, a white cube van.

She jounced in the dark with every bump and turn in the road, until the van finally stopped and the back doors opened. She saw a place that she recognized as an aquarium. When finally brought inside and released into the glass box of water, she looked around and saw only fabricated walls beyond the glass, instead of the infinite expanse of her new ocean home. Her heart sank like talus tumbling to the seafloor.

She watched as a man took off his wetsuit and spoke to another man and a woman wearing white lab coats. She tried to decipher their muffled conversation, but only heard “We’ll call her Aquarina,” and watched as the other man wrote the name on a small plastic plaque, before affixing it to the tank.

She spent days of doing very little in the four-sided fish ‘bowl’, just lazily floating, napping or occasionally eating shrimp or a skittish crab. She hoped her abductors would see how unhappy she was and release her back into the ocean. But they just kept staring at her strange appearance, a human head and shoulders attached to eight huge feelers. They also frequently wrote things in a notebook, and inserted some kind of chemical into the aquarium water each day.

Aquarina started to question her decision to morph into an octohuman. After all, what was the point of being able to hide herself by squirting ink if she could not run away afterwards? No longer able to escape the pain she thought she left behind on the rocky seashore, she had a decision to make.

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The doctor checked in with the nurse before he went to see his patient. “Amy, her blood work is looking good. How has she seemed to you over the past few days?”

The nurse smiled and glanced through the glass window of the patient’s room. “She seems like she’s perking up, doctor. She’s finally started speaking to us and agreed to have a visit with her family later today. I think the Effexor is starting to kick in. It’s hard to believe she survived at all, let alone regained her comprehension and speech. She still has some skin redness and peeling from the frostbite, but otherwise, she is doing well. I’m not sure if she’ll remember you though. She only just started to call us nurses by name.”

“Good, good,” said the doctor with a nod, “I’ll go in to see her now then.”

He opened the door and smiled as he approached the patient’s bedside. “I hear you’re doing much better, Katrina. You might be able to go home soon if this keeps up.”

Katrina looked at him, confused. “I’m not going back to the ocean now. I’m here to stay.”

“Of course! I’m sorry, I said go home, to your house,” he said more loudly and distinctly, “home with your family.”

Katrina shook her head, her newly cut dark hair tied back in a ponytail that bounced when she parchedly laughed and said, “Yes, yes, right.”

The doctor spoke some more as she looked out the window at the trees, hiding the city streets beyond. And she knew that much further beyond was the rugged coast, where her home surrounded her. Briefly closing her eyes, she pictured the painted white wooden house, in contrast with the blackness of the vast and deep ocean. “Are you alright?” asked the doctor when he looked up from finishing some notes on her chart.

“I’m just getting a little tired again,” she said with a small smile.

“Well, you best get some more rest now. I’ll be back to see you again tomorrow,” he said before walking out, and the door quietly closed behind him.

Aquarina removed the pink cardigan she had been wearing over her hospital gown and looked at the chapped, round red marks on her arms. She gently ran her fingers over them and wondered if the scarring from where the suckers had been would soon heal.