Anemone

Kraken

I feel her slime coat smear across my gloves. An acid strong enough to boil steel cobwebbing my fingers like snot from my grandmother’s nose. The foreman yells at me to focus and I start scraping, the glass knife tearing her papillae. Once I’ve cleaned her off I raise the circular saw, but it won’t start. Warren slams a palm into my shoulder.

“Let me show you how it’s done, little lady!”

An arc of cobalt blood spatters his plastic smock as he drives the tungsten blade through her flesh. He butchers her like a celebrity chef, lips parted behind his visor as he leans hard into the cut. I can almost imagine him rhapsodizing about her in French: Top notes of rotting horseshoe crab . . .

I hate him like I hate all the men I’ll never be big enough to fight. I look down the length of the kraken, a hundred meters from the tips of her longest tentacles to the gigantic nautilus shell of her head, as big as a hot air balloon, nestled in the sand at the water’s edge. The foreman calls a break; I walk towards her shell while the others go off to eat lunch and whisper about unionizing. I stare into her pinhole eye, my boots half sunk in blue-blood mud. Her corpse stares back, her eye no less alive than it was a week ago, when she raised the USS Farragut into the sky and tore her hull in half.

The most beautiful beast I have ever seen.

*

We are cutting up K-49, Lady Miranda. All krakens have women’s names, like hurricanes once did. As for her sex, I can’t say. I dreamed of a chance to see her ladyship’s ladybits, but the company scientists cut those parts off first.

Her kind were classified a few years ago, their bodies spirited away in the dead of night by navy scientists, but now people treat them like beached whales, and the government calls PontusCorp to clean up the mess. I only got the job because I know how to use a buzz-saw and suck off a chaser, courtesy of my misspent youth.

*

The first kraken, K-1, was Lady Abigail. She kept the navy guessing for months, nothing but a shadow under the surface of the sea, a blip on a submarine’s sonar. Her screams burst the hulls of every ship in New York Harbor; her tentacles cut a dozen navy submarines to ribbons. It took a hurricane to kill her, flinging her ashore to suffocate under her own weight, a slab of gray blubber streaming acid stingers. After her came others: Lady Bithiah, who came up in a trawler’s nets near Iceland; Lady Delilah, whose pulsing lights lured people into the water from Lisbon to Havana; Lady Esther, who bathed in the black oil of a tanker she bisected in the Gulf of México.

After her came others: Lady Bithiah, who came up in a trawler’s nets near Iceland; Lady Delilah, whose pulsing lights lured people into the water from Lisbon to Havana; Lady Esther, who bathed in the black oil of a tanker she bisected in the Gulf of México.

I didn’t want to talk about them, not even with Suzy; by the time Lady Abigail washed ashore two years ago, we were getting tired of each other. In silence we watched a livestream of Lady Esther ravaging the tanker, Stella Immaculate. I hid my tears as a drone’s rocket turned the oil covering her mantle into a shroud of fire.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Do you think this is revenge?”

“For what?” said Suzy. “It’s a squid, Zoe. It doesn’t get angry whenever someone gives an oil executive a tax break.”

*

I arrive just before sunrise, when the overnight crew are getting out of the field showers and the trucks they’ve loaded are leaving for the toxic waste repository. I sit in the open door of my car, listening to the seagulls, inhaling the oily stench of Miranda’s rotting flesh. Francis is here too, toweling his locs as he pushes through the security perimeter’s turnstile. He walks slowly, his eyes red with overtime. I pour him coffee, try not to let his softness remind me of Suzy.

“How’d a girl like you get this job anyway?” he says.

“I gave a really good blowjob during the interview,” I say.

Francis laughs; he thinks I’m kidding.

“Are you married?” he says.

I look at Suzy’s silver ring, which she gave me at the clothing swap where we met. I remember wanting her so badly I couldn’t breathe, wanting her wide, dimpled face and the soft folds of her stomach and thighs just visible through the gauzy fabric of her lilac sundress. I looked like a grub beside her, a skinny little puke in colorless rags.

“No.”

I point to the floodlights shining over the black-tipped mandibles of Lady Miranda’s beak. “What are they doing there?”

“They found something,” says Francis. “About an hour ago, some kind of pheromone gland in her jaw. The researchers were really excited about it.”

“Krakens have pheromones?”

“This one does,” says Francis. He chuckles. “Oh no, Miss Cthulhu wants to kiss me!”

The rest of the morning crew arrives and I join the line at the security perimeter. A dead-eyed guard—Sgt. Lambert, she of the blue undercut and Breast Cancer Awareness ribbon— orders me into the scanner, caress-checks my tuck for contraband.

*

Even after the navy killed Lady Delilah with a depth charge, people kept walking into the sea. They said they saw hypnotic lights in their dreams, great krakens passing cloud in the water below them. That they heard songs calling them to the ocean, even though the krakens are deaf and do not sing even to each other. Suzy’s mom threw a fit when she learned we were moving to Bridgeport, called us in hysterics because what if they get you too?!!

Cults flourished in the ground conspiracists had tilled. In Florida, a bunch of retired hippies declared that the krakens were angels, come to call us back to the primordial waters. On our too-small bed, in my cousin’s mildewed railroad apartment on Kossuth Street, Suzy and I watched a livestream of the squid cultists wading naked into the long shallows of the Gulf. I took Suzy’s tiny feet in my lap, massaged the ache out of her heels.

“Let me make you dinner,” I said. “Scrambled eggs?”

“No,” said Suzy. “We’ve been over this, Zoe. I make my own food and eat it alone.”

I laughed. It made me angry, her unwillingness to let other people see her eat. As if she didn’t have perfect table manners. As if she didn’t eat tiny portions of the blandest food, even as I offered her every once-a-year delicacy of my childhood: bryndza dumplings, poppy seed rolls, kapustnica studded with thick pieces of sausage.

I craved a dream of her, of a queen ordering her servant to bring her treats.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“That’s none of your business. Would you like it if I grilled you about your bowel movements, Zoe? Would that bother you?”

By then we couldn’t go a day without arguing.

*

Three o’clock. I wash sand and blood out of my hair in the field showers, my pink sandals clacking on the metal floor. I find Warren outside and bum a cigarette off him, taste bitter with the tip of my tongue as I light up.

“Want to go for a walk, little lady?”

We go west from the turnstile, the beach thinning into a narrow strip under dunes held together by marram grass and beach plum, the fecal mud of the salt marsh to our right and the seaweed-blackened water of the Sound to our left. Warren gives me his jacket, bares his tattoos to the wind. I glance back, watch Miranda’s shell disappear behind us.

“You’re awfully quiet,” says Warren. “No one’s giving you any shit, right? Remember, if they do, you tell them you’re my lady, so they can fuck off.”

“You still know that guy from R&D, right?”

“I still fuck him up the ass, yeah.”

I try not to think of the only twink on the research team, a beardless beanstalk whose reward for being nice to everybody is a lover who treats him like dogshit. “Maybe you can help me with something.” I say.

“Oh?”

“I need ten minutes in the trailer where they’re keeping her glands.”

“Ah, thinking of a little biopiracy, are we?”

“I just want to look at them.”

“And what’s in it for Big Warren?”

We’re in a quiet spot now, protected from the wind by bayberry trees and a heap of shells. Warren smiles, his eyes huge and bright with want. I step into his arms and breathe the last of my smoke into his mouth, kneel on the sand and fumble for the fly of his jeans. I swallow my own vomit as he thrusts against the back of my throat.

*

Kraken was a word the internet picked. No scientist would classify them as the same species; they have no more in common with each other than with ordinary cephalopods. Some features reoccurred. Acid slime coat on their tentacles and stingers. Bioluminescence, to summon or baffle other creatures in the benthic darkness where they lived. Enormous eyes to take in even the smallest amount of light. A good sense of smell. Taste buds in their skin.

Acid slime coat on their tentacles and stingers. Bioluminescence, to summon or baffle other creatures in the benthic darkness where they lived. Enormous eyes to take in even the smallest amount of light. A good sense of smell. Taste buds in their skin.

Suzy was going to be a marine biologist, once upon a time. She told me that most cephalopods don’t live more than a few years, that five is old age for a giant squid. That the only ones we see are the slow, the sick, the ancient surfacing to die.

“I wonder how long their lives are,” I said, scrolling through kraken pictures after a camming session. Suzy glanced over my shoulder, the fat of her arms molding softly around my neck. “Do you think they live a long time?” I asked.

“They’d have to live a long time to get that big,” she said. “They said they found a statolith in Lady Esther. It showed she was about twelve years old. But if they’re anything like squids, their lives must be shorter than ours.”

“That’s so unfair,” I said. “Something so beautiful should have a long life.”

“That’s just how it is. Fairness is a human idea.”

I could feel her getting hard as she pulled me against her, her hands slipping between my legs and along my chin. She breathed into my throat.

“If they really are gods, then they don’t care, and we’re still alone. Don’t think about them, little girl. Think about your queen.”

I let her sweet weight crush the air from my lungs.

*

In the cramped, bright-lit confines of the trailer lab I watch Ash, the twink, draw up a milliliter of fluid from Miranda’s gland. A hundred other tissue samples float in tanks of formaldehyde above our heads.

“What did Warren tell you?” I ask.

“He said you were going to sell this to some New Age freaks.” 

“You believe that?”

“No, I can’t say I do.”

“Then why are you helping me?”

“Oh, you know—you’re one of us, aren’t you? A seeker?”

He beams with excitement, hands trembling.

“You want to see one in the wild,” he says. “Don’t worry. I do too.”

I slip a vial of her pheromones into my bag and follow Ash out the door, down the steps to the beach. I’m still working up the nerve to tell the lovestruck fool that I’m fucking his boyfriend when Sgt. Lambert lurches into my path, a blue-gloved hand outstretched.

“Stop,” she says. “Come with me.”

“Sergeant, please,” says Ash. “She hasn’t—”

“You don’t have permission to be here,” says Sgt. Lambert. “Show me your bag.” 

“Am I being detained?”

“I need to search your bag. Open it now.”

“No, I don’t—”

Sgt. Lambert grabs my shoulder and slams me into the side of the trailer. She pulls my bag off and drops it onto the sand. I hear the workers on the shore yelling, the waves breaking, a pair of handcuffs clicking around my wrists.

“Stay still. Don’t make this harder for yourself.”

“Stop it!” Ash yells. “I was just trying to help her!”

Sgt. Lambert turns to look at him, still holding me against the wall. I can barely hear him over the ringing in my ears.

“One of the guys groped her in the worker’s bathroom,” he says. “I told her she could use the private toilet in the lab, that’s all. That’s the only reason we’re here. Please let her go.”

Sgt. Lambert’s grip slackens. I look over my shoulder and see her glance from the bag to me. I hear the cuffs click open.

“In future, you should report incidents of workplace harassment to us,” she says to Ash.

*

Eventually the newspapers got bored with the squid cults and went back to the lukewarm climate denial I’d grown up on. Fewer people were kraken-walking; the ones who did were freaks who could be written off. After Lady Esther none of the krakens were violent—none until Lady Miranda. They washed up dead or dying, usually after hurricanes.

Suzy and I got our own place in Bridgeport. We started camming together more often, finally got a bed big enough to share. On our last day I lay on that bed with cum on my stomach and a handful of my hair stuck in my mouth, watching a centipede patrol the popcorn ceiling while Suzy pulled her gloved hand out of my asshole.

I made chicken paprikash for dinner, watched her turn to face the wall as I gave her a plate.

“Really, Suzy?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “We’ve been over this, Zoe. I don’t like people watching me eat.”

I looked from my own plate to the mirror on the back of our door. I stared at myself, the same scrawny flat-chested little boy who cut her own balls off before she had the chance to grow up. I wanted to cry. I wanted to prize Suzy’s mouth open and shovel both our plates into it.

“Suzy,” I said. “Suzy, please.”

“What? What is it that you want so fucking much, Zoe?”

“You know what I want.”

I watched two minutes pass on the clock behind her head while she looked at me, arms folded across her chest.

“Do it, then,” she said. “You can do it once, if you want to so badly.”

I should have begged her to forgive me. Instead I pinched a piece of chicken in the first three fingers of my hand and slipped it into her mouth. I didn’t even smear her lipstick.

“I want to serve you,” I said. “My queen. I’ve never wanted anything else.”

“I don’t need you to serve me,” said Suzy.

I pretended not to hear. She started to cry, but I pretended not to see. I put the smallest pieces of food into her mouth and longed for her body as I watched her chew them, longed to be as soft as she was. I wanted to be part of her beauty. I wanted her to swallow me whole.

When I woke up she was gone. She blocked my number, left no note.

*

I started walking at night. Bridgeport was too familiar; I drove to Stratford instead, walked along the seawall under sodium streetlamps. When the sidewalk turned to surf I hardly noticed. I watched Lady Miranda emerge beneath me, her body pulsing a passing cloud so bright it shone through the thick opal of her shell. I watched the mottled light descend her body, from the glands behind her eyes to the tips of her tentacles. I wanted her. I wanted to be her and be with her, forever, a queen of the world to come.

I want to believe she joined Lady Miranda and her kind under the sea, the old gods who have come back to remind us that we have been poor caretakers of the world and our time has come to an end.

I don’t know what’s become of Suzy. Maybe she moved back in with her mom, or went to join her friends in Boston. But I don’t want to believe that. I want to believe she joined Lady Miranda and her kind under the sea, the old gods who have come back to remind us that we have been poor caretakers of the world and our time has come to an end. I remember how we stared at the photos together. I imagine how we’d shed our human skin, our ribs blossoming into tentacles, our new forms diving into the abyss.

*

A year after Suzy left, the most corporate of my ex-girlfriends got in touch to apologize for how things ended. As if half a decade without talking to each other would make me feel better about the fact that she wouldn’t be seen with me in public. But I swallowed my pride.

You’ve got a job at Pontus, I texted her. You really want to say you’re sorry? Help me get one too.

*

Five o’clock in the morning. Almost no one is here; they’ve fired half the overnight crew for trying to unionize. One day, when I am a god, I will punish PontusCorp for that. I wait until the guard at the security perimeter goes on a smoke break and use my jacket to hop the fence.

Wet sand squelches under my bare feet. Miranda’s body is bled almost dry, her tentacles and feeding arms cut to mutilated stumps under her shell, but a little blue still leaks from her skin, fans over her mucus membranes. I take off my clothes and thrust my glass knife into her body. I gouge the stump of her tentacle, acid mucus smearing on my hands, and I reach in and pull out handfuls of watery blood and cover myself in her. I fall down in a pool of it and roll over, coating my hair and back. My skin burns, fine layers of it peeling, but the pain is bearable until I touch my ear and remember too late that I left a single metal stud in place. I bite through my tongue and vomit onto my chest as the stud melts through my earlobe, a stream of blood spilling down my neck. I grab the pheromone vial and empty it onto my face and armpits as the guards race towards me with their flashlights. The workers follow them—Francis is here, and Warren, picking up an extra shift. I hear Sgt. Lambert shouting, gun in hand, and turn to run; her shot bursts my left shoulder, pain blurring my eyes as I fall into the surf. I force myself up with my right hand and see Francis wrestling the gun away from her, see another guard felled by a blow to the jaw. Warren crouches at my side, a smile on his face, curling a plastic-covered arm around my burning body.

“We’ll take care of the pigs,” he says. “Need a lift, little lady?”

I motion for him to raise the visor off his face, and when he does, I spit acidic mucus in his eyes. He drops me with a scream. I start to laugh, a long, loud laugh that almost stops the brawl between the guards and the overnight crew, that makes Francis look at me with wide, fearful eyes. I wish I could have said goodbye to him.

I walk into the water. I point my wounded arm straight ahead and swim sidestroke into the Sound, trailing Miranda’s blood and mine.

*

The coast of Connecticut has faded and the sky is red and lilac with sunrise when I begin to drown. I tell myself not to panic. As I sink into the water it occurs to me how vast the ocean is, how much of their lives the krakens spend alone beneath it, how unlikely it is that they will find me. I tell myself it’s worth the risk, that I was already dying along with every other human, and as the pressure of the water above me forces a bubble of carbon dioxide from my mouth I realize I’m too tired to be afraid. The last air in my lungs is compressed until I see bright lights behind my eyelids and feel laughter welling under my diaphragm. The cold water soothes my punctured shoulder and melted ear.

When I open my eyes again I feel them dilate, see the water turn clear as glass. I watch as her ladyship’s body rises towards me: K–50, Lady Nameless, a passing cloud pattern undulating from her naked mantle down to the tips of her tentacles. I hear Suzy’s voice in my head as her tentacle licks and savors my bloody skin, oozes around me and draws me towards the W-shaped pupil of her eye. I feel the murmur of her silent song, and try to speak to her as I spoke to Lady Miranda in Stratford.

“Who are you?”

Time passes. I hear another voice, Suzy’s voice, answer mine.

Who—are—you?

I look deep into her eye as her tentacle crushes my ribs, blood and bile mixing in my open mouth, the last air forced out of me. She doesn’t know me, she never will. I realize the price of my dream: to become one of her kind I would have to forget my life, forget the desire that led me here. There will be no second chance for me and Suzy; to become a god would be to lose her again, forget her forever, as the Lady’s guts churn me into a ribbon of squid shit. Her tentacle coils tighter around my waist and I feel my skin tear, hear my vertebrae crack and rupture under my lungs. She guides me toward her beak, outlined in glowing flesh, and as she pulls me into her maw her I feel a surge of want, a rush of blood to my cock. The tip of her tentacle slips between my legs and I breathe water deep into my lungs as I come. I can feed her, at long last.

I enter her. I nourish god.