Kiss of the Sea

The girl was perhaps five or six years old, but she didn’t look upset or lost. Perhaps it was her bright yellow dress spattered with blue dots that first caught Johnny’s eye, or perhaps it was the utter stillness of her body as she sat on the bench, staring at the fish tank opposite her. Although her legs were too short to reach the floor, she didn’t kick her shoes against the air like other children that age. Instead, her ankles were neatly crossed, her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes focused with clear and unwavering determination at the water in front of her.

Johnny was on his way to the front security desk to ask his co-worker Paul to grab some lunch down the street. He wasn’t sure why he turned his head at that exact moment to look at the bench. However, there was such intensity in the girl’s gaze that Johnny followed her eyes to see where she was looking.

At first, he wasn’t sure of the girl’s focus—the tank she was looking at was fairly large, and it contained an assortment of fish found in the brackish waters of southeast Asia, such as mackerel and bream. It wasn’t one of the special exhibits that usually attracted many kids, like the sea otters or penguins; the tank highlighted the fish of the Pacific and was often passed over for the more “exciting” displays. Although they’d gotten a recent shipment of blue-ringed octopuses to add to it this last month, the exhibit was still not the largest draw. The octopuses were tiny creatures and often hid under the large gray rocks during the day. Johnny had been particularly worried about the smallest of the octopuses, since it wasn’t eating as much as it should and was fairly listless.

However, something odd was going on in the tank—an octopus had splayed itself on the glass opposite where the girl was sitting, almost as if it were trying to reach out to her. Perhaps that was what the girl was staring at; it was odd behavior for the reclusive creature.

At the thought, Johnny glanced around the aquarium. There were the regular assortment of families and school groups passing through on a Wednesday—not the busiest day of the week, but they’d definitely hit peak hours for today. However, no family appeared to be searching frantically for a lost member, and the eagle eyes of teachers and volunteers seemed to be scanning their school groups without any obvious distress at a missing child. This girl, sitting by herself, was an anomaly.

As he approached the bench, Johnny spared one last glance at the tank to see the sandy bottom overrun with crabs. Aside from the octopus, perhaps that was what held her fierce focus? He didn’t know. But in order not to spook her, he didn’t get too close to where she was sitting. He stopped a few feet away—close enough that he wouldn’t need to shout over the echoing chatter of patrons, which bounced off the tile floors and glass tanks, but far enough away that he didn’t think he would scare a girl being approached by a stranger.

“Hello,” he started out innocuously enough, aiming for a neutral tone. “I noticed you were sitting here by yourself—are you missing your family?”

The girl looked up at him and, for a moment, he had the feeling that her eyes were moving slightly apart from each other. But the moment passed when he met her gaze. They were a deep blue like the ocean under the sun, with flecks of gold that ran from the pupil down to the edge of the iris to form a molten ring. He’d never seen eyes so strange and beautiful except in ocean creatures, and it gave him pause for a moment before he realized that the girl wasn’t answering him.

He tried again. “I work here,” he said, pointing at his badge and trying to appear friendly. His shirt also had the aquarium’s circular kelp logo and name embroidered on one side of the chest. “My name is Johnny.”

His voice was edged with some of his nervous discomfort—while he enjoyed taking care of his piscine companions at the aquarium, he was a bit out of his depth here. Johnny had never married nor had any desire to do so. No kids to his name, just an isolated bachelor pad that he’d managed to buy with a small inheritance after his parents had passed away. While part of his job was giving tours and talks, the thin veneer of patience he put on while being forced to interact with the public was the most he could manage. To him, kids were foreign creatures stranger than the animals found a league under the sea.

In fact, Johnny saw little value in people at all—the true value was in the creatures he nurtured in their tanks. A necessary evil to keep these wonderful animals captive, in order to educate people about the oceans and what human pollution was doing to harm these beautiful specimens. If it meant unfairly imprisoning these creatures to save them, so be it. He would shoulder that burden.

The girl opened her mouth, but no words came out. Her lips were colorless but glistening, as if she had recently had a drink of water. Johnny wasn’t sure why he was noticing this detail, but like his attention had been drawn to her and he wasn’t sure why, there was something about her features that made him slightly uneasy. And the expression on her face didn’t seem to be shyness—she was looking right at him.

But perhaps he was reading too much into this chance encounter. She was, after all, very young—she was tiny.

“Can I bring you to the front desk?” he asked, more gently than before. “They can make an announcement with your name and help your parents locate you.”

This time, he was sure he wasn’t imagining things—her behavior was definitely odd. Her mouth opened and closed in a regular rhythm, but there were no words that followed. No other part of her moved—her hands were still folded in her lap, legs crossed at the ankle. Her gaze held his. Just her mouth, opening and closing like a fish gasping for oxygen.

He was at a loss and wished, suddenly, that he had never started this encounter. That he had seen her and looked away without shouldering the burden of responsibility for another person. He glanced around at the crowds surging past, hoping to catch another aquarium employee’s attention, someone who would know better what to do. Someone who could perhaps carry a message to the front desk while he waited with the girl to keep her safe. But the people around him were paid patrons of the establishment rather than someone familiar who could help.

Another thought came into his head, and he realized that even from a slight distance, he was towering over this girl—he remembered reading somewhere that it could be intimidating for a child when talking to a grownup. So he took a step closer and squatted down so they were almost eye-to-eye. “What is your name?” he asked quietly. “I’m sure we can find your parents.”

Since the girl had been so still up until that moment, Johnny was completely unprepared when she moved. No, not moved—flowed. Her limbs seemed to have no bones, and between one blink and the next, she had catapulted from the bench and knocked him to the ground as her arms and legs whipped past his body like tentacles. He could see deep pock-marks on the undersides of her forearms as she shoved him, almost as if she had been marked by suction cups from a sea creature. That tiny mouth that had so bothered him rested briefly on his flailing arm as he fell, and he could feel the imprint of her teeth like a kiss before he was on his back and all he saw was the vaulted ceiling. A whale skeleton floated there, unreachable and forever swimming through the air.

Air. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. The fall seemed to have taken it out of him. In fact—he tried to move, but his limbs didn’t seem to be under his control. Perhaps a knock to the head, he thought. But even as he angled his neck to catch a glimpse of the fleeing girl and blinked with slow, languorous flicks of his eyelids, he realized something else was wrong. His vision, perfect twenty-twenty since he could remember, seemed to tremble at the edges. He blinked again and the words of the plaque in front of him blurred and twisted in odd ways. When his eyelids opened, he could read the words again.

This was the tank the girl had been staring at. The octopus was nowhere to be seen anymore, but he read the sign, which stated, "Blue-ringed octopus." He knew the rest of the plaque by heart because of his many hours attending to this tank, but each word crossed his gaze like a bell tolling. "These small creatures have venom in their bite over a thousand times more powerful than cyanide. The venom paralyzes the octopus’s prey, most often solitary crabs or fish, before they consume them."

His breath dragged in his throat, and this time, it was his mouth opening and closing but no words coming out. Sounds were fading in and out in his ears, but he was still aware enough of his surroundings that he could see people had gathered over him, leaning in and trying to touch him, talk to him, get him to respond.

But humans were unimportant to this moment. Those eyes, he thought helplessly. The numbness was creeping up his chest and neck, and he knew there was very little time left to him. The room was growing dark—no, that didn’t seem right. It was the middle of the day. It should still be bright and sunny.

No surprise anymore why he had spotted the small creature, sitting there on a bench by herself. Her dress was yellow with spots of blue, mimicking the coloring of a blue-ringed octopus, and her eyes—he had never before seen eyes like hers outside the depths of saltwater. They were eyes that did not belong here, eyes that drowned in the air.

No wonder she had been unafraid of him—she was small but immensely dangerous, more so than all the people who surrounded her. She was free at last after months of captivity, but she must have felt cornered when confronted by her months-long keeper.

Afraid no more, he realized. She had lashed out, little realizing that he was nobody for her to fear. Johnny had always been attracted to the beauty of sea animals—they seemed so pristine and alien compared to his fellow humans. They seemed like kindred spirits to him.

An egotistical conceit on his part. Johnny closed his eyes, feeling little regret. He had devoted his life to the sea. And the sea had finally come to claim him.