“Yes, Mother, I’m fine. No, I haven’t been sick, I’ve just been busy. No, I’m not too busy for you, Mother, I just. No, Mother, really.”
Lily Mackey spoke softly into the phone cradled in the crook of her shoulder, staring into the blood ringing her kitchen sink. It ran down her knife and from the edges of the cutting board perched over the rim of the basin as she severed fish heads. Seven store-bought fish (cloudy eyes, wide-mouthed like something on display) lay on the counter to her left, waiting to be de-scaled, segmented, severed, chopped, diced and filleted. In the shopping bag she left three whole crabs to warm under the sunlight stripping the kitchen table. It smelled vaguely of rot already, filling her small house as though carried by the flies lazily beginning to circle around her. Her mother knew nothing of this.
“I really don’t know what’s the matter with you,” her mother rasped over the phone, voice dry from cigarette smoke. “I haven’t seen you, you barely call, and you certainly never come to church anymore.”
Lily could hear the cigarette dangling from her matte salmon mouth, propped lazily between two bony fingers adorned by long red nails and an assortment of gold rings. Class ring, her grandmother’s engagement ring, the wedding band her mother refused to take off, even after her father had thrown his out some eighteen years ago. It was likely sitting in a dumpster somewhere, or in a landfill as Lily had often imagined, with some old shoe boxes and fish heads, like the one staring up from the cutting board in a puddle of blood.
“I’ve just been working a lot, and getting some work down around the house,” Lily half-lied and ran her knife down the belly of the fish, splitting it open. Its insides were pink and wet, the meat veined and flanked by tiny white slivers of bone. Lily wrinkled her nose, and hoped it couldn’t be heard over the telephone. “I’ll try to make it to service on Sunday, Mother. I’ve missed going with you, I just haven’t had the time. I promise.”
A splashing sound from outside the kitchen window caught Lily’s attention in a flutter of lashes. She smiled, if only just, and dug the slivers out of the fish’s back with her fingers.
“I have to go, Mother,” she said, and hoped smiles couldn’t travel over telephone lines either. “I love you, I’ll call you later.”
Her mother’s voice died over the line as Lily clicked the red button on her phone and set it down on the counter, and dissected the rest of her fish. She could feel salt begin to gather along her brow and wiped it away with her wrist in a sigh before washing her hands, wringing them dry in a dish towel. Quietly Lily gathered the fish pieces on a plate with a glass of water, on a serving tray with some salt, undid her apron and left it twice-folded on the table beside the bag of rotting crab meat.
Through the back door and down the concrete steps that served as her back porch Lily dutifully carried the tray across her meager back yard on bare feet, to the above-ground pool that she had installed there the month earlier. Five feet deep and eight feet across, its heavy metal belly was full of salt water (Lily checked the pH levels religiously every week to be sure of that) and attached to the ground by a slab of concrete and a squat white ladder. It had cost all of the money in Lily’s rain-day fund to put up but it was worth every penny. Her mother didn’t know about that, either.
Lily set the tray over the edge of the pool and climbed the ladder as her octopus curled up to the side, a slink of black leather under the break of the tiny waves she had created. Lily didn’t bother to slip out of her sundress as she slid gingerly into the water with a shiver, feeling the cold swell under her clothing and all over her skin before quickly warming. In a swirl of limbs the octopus met Lily’s eyes, enveloping her in their warmth, pulling her close and keeping her there.
“I brought you some fish,” Lily said, and smiled.
Wet black hair made a lopsided frame around the octopus’ broad face and she blinked it from her amber eyes. They glowed, if only just, under the sun reflected in the water’s surface, speckled red and black when the octopus smiled.
After a moment, Lily let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “My mom is worried.”
“Why?” the octopus affected flatly, both a question and a response. The tentacles tightened their hold.
“I haven’t been going to church.” Lily’s thin fingers braced herself upright in the octopus’ tangled limbs as they curled around her hips and between her thighs, cradling her against the pool’s steel belly. “She thinks I’m avoiding her, I guess.”
“She misses you?” A single black tentacle wound lovingly into Lily’s hair, suction cups sticking to the flesh of her cheek and around the shell of her ear. Another made motion for the tray of fish, bringing it near the octopus with little effort. “Do you need to see her?”
“Maybe.” Lily watched the way the webbing of her fingers appeared translucent against the thick leathery hide of her octopus’ well-muscled arms. The octopus’ skin seemed to shimmer when wet, chromatophores shifting under sunlight from natural black to the white of the pool’s walls and belly in alternating blinks. She patted one tentacle lovingly, as one would the head of an obedient dog. “She wouldn’t understand, though. About you, about…this.”
“Does she need to?”
A tendril slipped around Lily’s belly, curling under the scalloping of her cotton bra. It made warmth spread from Lily’s cheeks down her neck, along her fingertips and over the insides of her thighs. For it she smiled.
“I guess she doesn’t.”
