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Semelparous

Ten Thousand Thoughts Eating a Single Mind

By Mackenzie DavisPublished 10 months ago Updated 7 months ago 4 min read
3
Semelparous
Photo by Zoran Borojevic on Unsplash

She is diving in an ocean that grows steadily darker, as though to obscure an abusive creature. A cyclic progression of sea meets her mask and passes her flippers, holding unseen life in muted bioluminescence. On occasion, a blanket octopus haunts her periphery, though it could be her babies walking home in the snow, or the birthday lunch with her granddaughter when they first bonded. Turning to look only shoves it further out of sight until she is grasping at rising bubbles.

Somewhere above, below, or off to the side is a Thanksgiving dinner at her youngest’s home. The eldest guides her up the stairs. Her chuckle at a vague familial pleasantry is but the click between tanked breaths. Laughter was Bert on the stairs with the bowl of mashed potatoes, his silver stubble and gold-crowned smile, his bright eyes leading the family in prayer—a larger circle than this gathering.

A grandchild hugs her: Okay, honey, she says smiling. The grandchild speaks, voice deafening and all she hears is a kush of water against her mask. The grandchild waves their hand, bares teeth, goes away. Her skin contracts beneath a short-sleeve pastel shirt and a thick, white, cotton jacket. In her periphery, people chat in couples.

There’s something in the depths. She grasps at bubbles she knows are there. Her legs kick through a thickened substance and her hands have shrunken to figs. Nothing breaks through the foggy dark. There is a blanket octopus on her back.

Hungry, mom? A hand on shoulder, forced patience and wide eyes. Repeat. She searches the mask for a word or two to make her go away—only the increasing dark answers. Rephrased. An answer is given, vague, perhaps “yes.” Come on.

The family is a myth of fingerprints, now. Their salt has dissolved and ebbs against her diving suit, pressurized with volume and gravity and depth. Cold seeps into her suit as she’s pulled up to the kitchen. The others remain in their pairs, one or two looking over.

Bert used to read out from his encyclopedias. Female octopuses, he’d read one afternoon, starve themselves while caring for their eggs. They spend every moment tending them, protecting them and watching them for ten months, never leaving the cave. Not even to eat. She becomes transparent, eating parts of herself. When the one hundred thousand eggs start to hatch, she dies.

Salad? She shakes her head. Green beans? Tara made them.

Tara! she says cheerfully. Tara would never finish the food on her plate growing up. She would run around the table away from Bert after insulting her mother. She drowns in vodka because she’s far away and alone.

The plate grows too heavy and there’s going to be leftovers and she sits down at the empty table. The territory of an evasive creature tickles the fringes of her awareness and fresh synaptic pulses light her way down.

Others join and talk around her. She doesn’t know what her face looks like.

Bubbles nudge past, the mask filling with crepuscular blindness as new species shine or don’t shine, both beacons to the bottom. Has anyone made it to the bottom of the ocean before? Bert has, she thinks.

Someone falls asleep and snores. People talk in pairs. Her three children buzz around, sit, and leave. And repeat.

Now she’s standing by the stairs with them and pitches towards the exit.

Digging now, she gouges out decayed crustaceans and eroded rocks, sucking out the dregs of an oxygen tank and knowing she needs to keep calm but is failing because she’s feeling the warmth of the Earth’s core moving through her muscles. There’s a light she can’t understand sprinkling her mask and rising through the sand and water, hanging there like stars and suddenly the ocean is gone and she drifts in a cradle of distant yet intimate constellations—eridanus, horologium, virgo—falling, strands of octopus eggs accumulating in her periphery (or maybe they’re Bert’s blue eyes or the sun glinting off the lake they used to sail with the girls) and she’s heading toward something endless, the sun above the surface of the ocean and down, down into the blackness of an octopus cave where she’s biting herself to stay alive enough.

Short Story
3

About the Creator

Mackenzie Davis

“When you are describing a shape, or sound, or tint, don’t state the matter plainly, but put it in a hint. And learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint.” Lewis Carroll

Find me elsewhere.

Copyright Mackenzie Davis.

Reader insights

Outstanding

Excellent work. Looking forward to reading more!

Top insights

  1. Compelling and original writing

    Creative use of language & vocab

  2. Excellent storytelling

    Original narrative & well developed characters

  3. Eye opening

    Niche topic & fresh perspectives

  1. On-point and relevant

    Writing reflected the title & theme

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Comments (4)

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  • Mesh Toraskar7 months ago

    Oh thanks to Rob, I found this hidden gem. Your prose is so viscous, I feel like I am drowning (pun intended)! I will be back with more thoughts. SUCH A MASTERPIECE

  • Thanks for introducing the term Semelparous into my vocabulary and putting it in the context of an octopus life cycle. Your story captures wonderful images and the use of the octopus as the thread is brilliant. Many arms - and legs- make light work of taking the reader to great heights and depths

  • Rob Angeli8 months ago

    The familial, daughterly, grand-daughterly transmission (yet isolation?) and sea of dementia/death disconnect: but it seems like it could be a sea of epiphany or revelation, rooting the whole line of them to the earth. Love the deep-sea octopus and crustacean chaos that ensues, the reader really does feel assailed by ten thousand thoughts with her.

  • J. S. Wade10 months ago

    Wow. This is fantastic! Exceptional prose. ❤️

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