The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

Rare is the mother who forgets the Goldfish crackers and is cannibalized in her minivan. More common is the one who devours herself.

You follow me with your trusting eyes, dark as the

North Sea, forgiving me in advance, or so it seems, for the many ways in which I will fail you.

You are smooth and pink, and I pretend that we are still one. But even as I think this, I know it isn’t true. I’m alone in my bo...

was able to conclude, then, with the relief that can accompany the death of hope, that these stories were mere fantasy, and that the conjugal disharmony of real life alone could be taken as fact.

A large part of her wished she could stop caring about whatever it was that had come between her dad and Lennox. Why this fixation on a past that wasn’t even hers? But she knew why. She could see how easy it would be to relive her parents’ lives without quite choosing to, the way a toboggan finds its way into the pre-compressed path of whoever went before. She wanted to better understand the route they had taken, so she didn’t fall into it by mistake.

She had the impression, as they ran through the train station parking lot and into the shelter of the big car, that Christina did not need to look outside of herself

very often for proof that she was living in the right way. But she displayed none of the smug self-satisfaction that one might expect to accompany this apparent peace of mind.

It is sometimes said that a mother is only ever as happy as her least happy child.

Pen felt as if she had been born prematurely and had somehow managed to return to the safety of the womb, where she wouldn’t have to breathe for herself any longer.

Her middle name was no longer a puzzle that needed solving. She was named for the ghost of a brother who had never been, and he had been named for the ghost of a friendship. Many of us are saddled with death at birth in this way; it is not a good excuse to get stuck in the past.

As always after a frenzy of ablutions, she was dismayed to see that she looked the same as ever: slightly unfinished. If

She and Pen had been friends since well before they had discovered the need to construct an outer shell, like that of an invertebrate animal, to protect the soft inner substance of the self. Childhood friendships often lose their hold at that point, when one sees that the person one loved has learned to disguise herself and will no longer be reachable, or at least not often. What made Alice feel certain, as Pen helped herself to the roll of toilet paper on her desk to wipe her nose, that this friendship could take them through every stage of their lives, cushioning them against the bone-crushing loneliness of being human, was that they did not have to pretend with each other. Silently, she vowed to remember this.

“After the female lays her clutch of eggs, she devotes herself entirely to cleaning and protecting them for months. She stops looking for food, unable to leave them even for a short time. She begins to waste away—senescence, it’s called. It’s as if she’s used up all her life force hunting, outmaneuvering predators, finding a mate, arranging her den, and then, finally, caring for her eggs. By the time they hatch, she’s starved herself to death, or nearly. Her skin, once capable of rapid changes in color and texture, goes pale and develops lesions that never heal. Her eyes go cloudy. She begins to pick at herself. Her decomposing body sometimes becomes a source of food for her young.” She smiled a sad, thin-lipped smile. “That’s the best she can do for them.”