This morning I cleaned an octopus.
I used my hands the way I was taught -firm, but not cruel, working rock salt into each arm until the suckers loosened. My body remembered the motion before my mind did. My grandmother, she taught me to massage the octopus until it stopped fighting. Until the muscles remembered they were not stone. She said it would taste of resentment if you didn’t soften it first.
Beneath the translucent skin, I saw a ripple of blue-black ink shifting like a bruise waiting to rise. I peeled the beak out like a splinter. There was still ink in the sac, thick and black. I rinsed it away without comment.
Anakin walked past and asked if it was alive. I said no, but it was. In the water, in the gesture, in the way I pressed my thumb into muscle and felt it give.
In the basin, the octopus folded in on itself. A creature without bones, without armor, yet it survived by becoming other things. It never won by force, only by knowing what frightened others.
The mimic octopus has three hearts. Two pump blood to its gills. One for the body. When it swims, the body heart stops. I think about that sometimes, how motion, for them, is a kind of sacrifice. You want to move forward, you have to quiet part of yourself. You want to survive, you don’t get to be whole all the time.
In the ocean, it chooses its costume. A lionfish if threatened from above. A flatfish when gliding over sand. When cornered, it mimics the striped glide of a sea snake. Scientists marvel at this. Watching this subtle dance of survival, I remembered my aunt, who wore long sleeves even in summer. Not out of modesty, but to be invisible.
No bones, they say. No skeleton to betray its true shape. That’s what makes it dangerous. Beautiful. Unknowable. What makes it able to leave any space it can fit its beak through. I once asked my mother what part of her could never bend. She didn’t answer.
Sea creatures in stories are rarely mothers. They’re monsters. Seducers. Warnings. No one asks who raised them.
But the octopus, it lays thousands of eggs and tends them without eating. She wraps herself around them, guarding them until they hatch. She doesn’t leave. She starves. She dies when they are born. Her body becomes the absence they swim through.
My mother used to cut her food into perfect portions but barely ate. Said she already tasted it when she cooked. Said it was enough to watch us eat.
I remember one night, I heard her crying in the bed. Not loud, just a quiet shake. There were four of us in that bed, and none of us moved.
Octopuses change color not just to hide but to feel. Anger turns them red. Fear bleaches them white. When they sleep, they ripple through shades, dreams made visible on skin. I wonder what my mother’s body would have said, if it could.
I thought of how the octopus survives by becoming. How it has no voice, but learns the shape of every danger. How sometimes the smartest thing a creature can do is disappear on purpose.
I placed it in a bowl, covered it with soy sauce and vinegar to marinate. Later, we would eat it. We would say it was tender.
But that’s not the truth.
It was softened.
There is a difference.
That night, after dinner, I opened the kitchen window. The air smelled faintly of laurel and ginger. I thought I heard my mother humming, a tune she learned from her mother. It was the same tune she sang while rubbing salt into the octopus arms, back when the ink still clung to the basin’s edge.
She never named the song but said it helped the meat forget.
Maybe this was how we lived, learning how to hold something without keeping it, letting memory soften, allowing ourselves to forget just enough to carry on.
