The man had just succeeded in valiantly grappling with the clamour of groceries over the threshold, returning home from morning attendance at the local ministry, when he noticed the squid. It lorded in a dynastic sprawl of tentacular spectacular on the opaque lime decline of his loungeroom ottoman. It was about the size and similar in general contour distribution to an asthma respirator, he saw: was the burnt umber hue of the twin propelled intake jets of some Luftwafte aircraft crying above Middle-Eastern seas, and it wholly resembled a blood orange equipped with a swarm of multiple tendrils, in addition to a solitary enviable lightning stone eye, bristling silver and irrevocably adrift with the dreams of future blooms of bream in white ice depths. The man, a pious churchgoer, howled with reasonable expectation of a satanic possession, or as assured defence against the assumed ascent of subterranean abominations now surely rife about town. The squid did not turn, however, and nor did it demonstrate, with an equable appreciation of the conventions of common sense, that it would launch itself at any imminent moment with tapered cephalopod appendages braced and belligerent onto the man's bloodless, inelegant face from across the room. It just sat, flowering exotically, its singular quince-shaped eye blinking with an occasional responsive curiosity. The man wanted to weep, but instead unsheathed a bottle from a parcel of ginger ale and enjoyed a wholesome, nerve-steeling swig. He savoured the long-staying burn of the carbonated sublime as it flowed down the passage of his throat, and he maintained a steely earthly gaze on his aquatic quarry, there on his couch, whilst winds whistled undaunted at the panes of his frost-favoured windows. The man seemed to consider sanctuary in unspoken options for an indeterminable period of time before appearing to exact some form of definitive decision, which involved studiously rolling up his sleeves, cracking open the silver-dollar seal of a pint of glassed milk, pouring the entire contents into a big well-cultured iron cooking pot, curling a golden forearm about the exterior of the cookware and placing it with a wordless exchange of intent at the foot of the ottoman.
'Go on,' he elaborated, clearing his throat. 'Have a lap.'
The squid orbited onto its side, cylindrical and stout as a shovel, before rolling to the chipped enamel-coat floor with the accompaniment of a soft and violent splat. Shivering like an archery of arrows, it slunk to the vessel of milk and began to drink.
The man finished his ginger ale, and nodded with reluctant pride at the feeding mollusc.
'Hungry, were you?' He placed swarthy hands blistered with prayer onto the ridges of his hips. His eyes shone. The squid's colours undulated like the form of a baby in ultrasound, as it lay on the man's lounge-room floor consuming half its body-weight in milk.
*
The man retreated to the desolation of a bed as big and emptied of friendship as pirate convoys encamped on the head of the Yangtze. He lay his face to his pillow's uncompromising softness, engaged in a war of vengeance and misery against the tormenting siren calls of the hounding Irish wind at the surface of his windowpane and roof. The man exhaled and wondered. He thought about the squid, and he thought about summers divested of chill and abundant with the strange precocity of wild laughter, of warm days spent tracking footfalls in warm sands, of that electric mane of hair, as black as starlight, wheeling and blowing into her eyes and his mouth as the air accelerated over the water. He thought about the dresses, as candid and diaphanous as photographs captured of butterflies in flight, packed up, boxed in, sent away. He thought about domestic sounds smote to dark corners in dim rooms as vast and terrestrial as forsaken landscape, sounds that should not ever be pursued and evicted from this hillside house, sounds that had as much utility and purpose as the wood fashioned to stabilise the house, sounds who proved the most generous tenants he could have ever invited to share the burdensome wealth of his privacy, sounds who left like friends do when they mean not to return, without word or signal or symbol, but with the cruelty of caprice and the loveless whispers of memories receding to a breakwater of ruin. He thought about how sad he had become, and how ugly, and how fast. He thought about all the mornings covertly spoiled by a ramshackle attack of tears, he thought about the immeasurable distance from his house on its hill to the first forge of shoreline by the bay, he thought about the dialogue of terns and the sordid mystery of snow, but he fell asleep thinking about summers ended and the squid, at rest in a shoebox in the bathroom.
*
Come morning, the man strapped the squid into the passenger-side seat of his car, having initially wrested with the animal's many-suckered arms, subjecting the flesh-and-chitin reef creature to a flounder of hand gestures and a brace of reticent and unhandsome finger prods, before soaring sullen and victorious in the defeat of the circumstance by shouldering the cephalopod like a bouquet of perennials in tented hands, seatbelting it into the upholstery, and climbing in opposite behind the steering wheel. He closed the door behind him with an agreeably dispatched kick, confirmed that all windows were loyal in remaining up, and then turned to his marine florentine passenger, and set hard the craw of his jaw.
'A church man like myself can't be having with putting up unusual and graceless guests.' He enveloped the form of the wheel with two wuthering hands, and watched the squid in the reflection of the rear-view. It merely sat, it merely flowered, it merely blinked. The man felt himself ever depleting the command and resources of his remarks by his heeding reverent vigil at the fragile cuttlefish flaming scarlet beside him. He hardened his heart to the incalculable fragilities of the greater world, cleared his throat once more with the precarious appetite of someone damned by the providence of a plan, and he rolled forward, his feet seeking pedals, turning the key in the ignition.
'No, a man such as myself can't be entertaining the company of hungry, unheralded onion-eater houseguests. It's much too depraved, much too devoid of responsibility or rationalisation. No, I'm afraid we're only going to have to see to it that you are returned to the sea.' The man nodded rapidly and inadequately, and smiled feebly without mirth, whilst outside the hillcrest dogwood rippled and rocked like a galleon in arbour. The squid was disastrously lost of visible action or given word. It blinked once, an eyelid of musculature and membrane shuttering focus of its baleful view, before resolving to stay put.
'Well, alright. You've only gone and undone the passion and patronage of strangers,' said the man, who was either crazy or heartbroken. 'There's no need to go dispel the kindness of the neighbourhood by biting the hand that feeds you.' The squid remained alert and inert. 'I'm just saying that a church man like myself can't envision a social fabric composed of freewheeling personalities, unaffected by gratitude and gravity at the nourishing nature of simple folk. I just can't see a world better off by failing to acknowledge or purvey reasonable iterations of thanks, when someone of bounteous moral virtue is willing to show hospitality and hubris. There's no world I want to be living in where the itinerant huckster bests the boundless peacenik by exploiting the sorry bastard for upkeep and unreciprocated service. It's the sea for you, I'm afraid. It's the sea for you and all those inspired by you.' The man exited the driveway, and they sped along the curvature of white limestone highway which feathered down in kilometres of oblivion toward the thundering reproach of the sea around Galway, the percussion of the waves' pummel as dry as a metronome, the water making blades of rock, and knives of coral, deep down in the foundry of the sea's smoking surge. The water brayed and whinnied as though thoroughbred mad with plague, emerging from behind an unending cartography of jagged wind-whipped coastline to spray in volleys of loathsome rain onto the windscreen of the vehicle. The man continued into the early afternoon, avoiding obstruction, braking when it was deemed absolutely necessary, and vaulting off toward the turquoise fang of the Galway harbour, storm clouds dank and disbelieving sailing fat and brutal through a sky incurably famished of glow or light, and soon the car descended to enter the villages of the unpeopled beaches, the squid as quiet as the theatre of lightning viewed invariably over the unimagined horizon. The man was getting tired, and the closer he got to the sea, the more he thought about affecting a U-turn and gaining ground anew beneath the axles of spinning tyres, about going home and taking poorly to bed.
'Now, don't say I didn't offer bonhomie or an affectionable opportunity to seek solace in returning appreciation for my kindliness.' The man was worried. His screaming eyes surveyed the ghosts of architectural marvels dotting the sweep of the coast like vertices of conductivity in a longitudinal wave of Tesla resonance, little houses and little cathedrals which shimmered emerald and obstinate beneath a dome of starry rainfall. He repeatedly wiped condensation from the back of the windscreen with a clumsy palm, and he increasingly began to underestimate the capacity for his car roof to withstand the buckshot rounds of intermittent hailstones now being cannonaded down upon them from on high. What had he ever said bitter or brightly of angels to warrant this? He decelerated considerably, downshifted gears and twisted in his seat to regard the squid. 'You'll not be forgot. I extol you this. You shall not be forgot, because you came to me when things were making discord of rhyme and reason. You came to me, and I fed you milk, and now you must be again claimed by the breast of the sea.' He pulled over to a small lookout rest-stop, allowed his car to idle, and disembarked from the vehicle bedraggled and bone-drenched down the incline of the closest dune crest, the squid tucked beneath the pit of his arm, storming on legs blindly searching for purchase, toward the great and mighty fathoms of the ocean. A sheet of lightning flashed white and brazen over the calm unadulterated meniscus, causing pelicans to uproot, sail high seeking holier soil. The man plunged shoes and calves into the lip of the tide, and levered the squid into both palms so as to brandish it aloft above his head. He cradled it as though its removal from his arms might incite the sky to fall.
'It mustn't be kept waiting. It mustn't be kept seething without sacrifice. The sea is a surly old bitch, and though she can be a stone fox sometimes, it's better not to damage the union by holding back when she's clearly howling for seduction.' He brought the squid to his sternum, offered an eye for an eye, then sighed low and shallow with considerable grief. His hair was matted to his forehead now, and rain was clawing at the deathly sockets of his cheeks. 'It's been delightful,' he told the squid, and meant it, with powerful sincerity, 'So I wish you the best sanctuary for your wellbeing.'
With this, the man launched the squid into the water like he was casting forth a flotilla of warships, and stood sequestered beneath the savagery of the storm as the squid became small and nondistinct, an airborne constellation falling into the wet slap of the ungiving reefbed.
*
It was Sunday the next week when the man came home from ministrations at the local church to find the squid in very much the same place as it had been six days previous, with full complement of extended limbs and a splendent lone eye as silver as sex and mead. He stopped at the door, dropped all manner of sundry paper-bag supplies, and ended up standing in the lentils. The man stood indecisively for a moment, regarding the tableaux of aquatic squatter amongst the eiderdown mass of his loungeroom furniture, and he gradually bent low to salvage an upturned pint of milk.
The man plundered his kitchen of cookware, uncapped the bottle, and poured the creaming thick milk stock into the worn iron pot. He ambled back into the loungeroom, angled the pot to face toward the squid alluringly on the floor, remained acquiescent and motionless whilst stood in the arch of the corridor. He indicated the cookware with an elaborate oration devised of eyebrow movements, and anticipated the squid's impending reaction.
There was a rapping at his door. He turned to find another, stood at his threshold, adrift amongst the convergence of lentils.
'I beg your attention, sir,' said the news-bearer, shuffling on feet encompassed by two crimson jackboots as formidable as switchblades. 'I do beg your pardon, sir, but I must take the squid. It is time for repatriating the animal to its homeland.'
The man eclipsed the squid behind a protective back, and dared the news-bearer in red boots to repossess the cephalopod of his own initiative.
'I'm sorry? It's time for repatriating the animal to its homeland? But you see, this is some specie of monstrous and obscene error on your part, good man –'
'I'm afraid not. Now, if you could –'
'See here, man, this is unthinkable and lurid in outrageous multitudes: this squid is my own, not yours, and certainly not property to any homeland but that which it claims as its own. Its primary destination designed for security and sovereignty is manifest of its own prerogatives, and no door-canvassing squirrel with faggot feet is going to take anything but a moment to remove his sugarboots from the ingredients of my evening meal, and hike the fuck down the street. Do you divine the intention in what I say to you? You cannot pretend to misunderstand.'
'I'm sorry, sir. The rules aren't my own, and as they're of anonymous manufacture, they function further as cosmically applicable. You cannot own something that does not conform to the governance of ownership, you can only engage or facilitate as host until it is time for the creature to return to its homeland. This is the way of intercultural exchange, this is the measurable significance of shared experience: it must end, sometime, for to agree to the confinement of entertaining an exchange such as this one, is to correspondingly agree to allowing the exchange to exist of its own mechanisms, to unravel back to its original situation, wherein the exchange never eventuated. This is only reasonable, sir. You cannot think that I, for my part, own the sun, can you, sir? I am privileged its light and its warmth and its trust, but in pledging loyalty to the inextricable nature of privilege, one day I must come to see that the sun is no more mine, than the breath which exits my lips to be inhaled by your own. In this way, then, the squid is merely a token, and tokens can be of no symbolic value when they are revoked.' The news-bearer shuffled, producing a vermillion timpani. 'I'm sorry, sir, but the squid.'
The man stood his ground, and extended his chest. 'I returned this animal to its homeland. It came to me once over of its own accord.'
The news-bearer smiled with a sickly patronising eagerness. 'Come now, sir, there is no foundation of fair play in bald-headed deception.' He squelched over lentils, broccolini, and sugar snap-peas. These crackled like kindling. 'The squid, sir. I must have the squid.'
'But it is true, you unmitigated infection of a man, I drove myself and the squid but six days prior to the mouth of the ocean around Galway, directly, and today I return from church to find the beast amongst my hellish ottoman. There can be no mistake: the squid has chosen my household for its homeland, and you must away.'
The man shook with fear and anger, shook like aspen leaves and the hands of meeting friends. He stood before the lounge with an undiminished ardour for argument.
The news-bearer drew chin to chest, and massaged the caverns of his mouth with the tip of tongue. 'We cannot compellingly expect the animal to make decisions proportionate to the validity of its needs. It is a creature, much like man, undone by an uncomplicated attraction to affection. You would be doing nought but promising the animal an existence couched in the pitfalls of quick-won doom, failing to enable an appropriate repatriation.' He drew nearer, retrieving a tiny ornate reed instrument from around his neck, attached as of a pennywhistle by an interlinked bronze chain, and within his smile developed an ever-present hunger, like a lunatic dreams of chaos or a trident dreams of triumph. The man stepped back from the news-bearer's approach, and seized the squid beneath the pit of his arm.
'Stay back, you swine! Stay back, for you cannot have it.'
The news-bearer placed the flouted mouthpiece of the lute to his lower lip, and began to play. The music entered the atmosphere as of the sinewy song of a furied serpent, rising with chords and progression within the house to ensnare the man in a rhapsody of transcendent noise, noise which effervesced as lime-peel twist is wont to do upon breaking surface tension of a glass of mohito, noise which peeled and percolated and rose and called to all those whom were subject to its synergistic cage of entrancing melody, noise which regurgitated and restored remembrances of a woman, fey and faithful, as she aquaplaned beneath wavelets which broke and slapped the peninsula in births of salt, sting and windswept sand. The noise was artful, and the noise was awful. The man felt the squid convulse in an ecstasy of falsified emancipation from within his embrace, and looked to find the creature preparing to launch at his face in a flux of defiance. He released the beast, and inched away timorously. The news-bearer grinned darkly, suggestive music unravelling the order of atoms, dashing the integrity of just solvency to shimmering smithereens, incanting the dead and rotten desires within, inciting the harvest of haggard, bitter fruit. The man thought about his wife, as the music played, thought about the way the sea claims fragile bodies unaccustomed to oceanic brutality, claims but is ever dissatisfied and unsatiated. The man thought about her outstretched body, strangulated and broke, hoping miraculously to the last to transmogrify water to air, like she seemed so able to transform him with those alchemical lips. The man thought about the lonely nights atop his hillcrest house, where the wind stole through the cornices and plasterwork crevasses into his bedroom to rage riotous and tempestuous in hours no holy or rested man would be awake. The man thought about those many lonely nights spent mourning and murdered by the depthless colds of turbulent, tameless places, and he thought about the squid, and the presumed reason it felt obligated to return. Was it love, or was that an illusion in a land as barren of company as this, a friendless house on a plateau above the swollen sea? What could this creature hope to find here, in this world, a structure housing a heartstaggered church man and his dead memories?
The squid slalomed in seraphic joy across the enamel coat-floor, toward the news-bearer and his shrieking lute. It stopped its contracting, muscle-fuelled procession with some resolute piety at the toe-tips of the news-bearer's smart crimson jackboots, peered searchingly upward at the news-bearer's voracious whirligig grin, and thus pivoted itself bodily at the news-bearer's gleeful countenance. The squid entwined tentacles around the news-bearer's skull, sealing his each respective gasping orifice with a mettle and vehemence of writhing, pulsating tendril, suffocating him inexorably and ineluctably with the speakeasy elegance of a shogun warrior. The news-bearer spasmed like the blooms of an anemone, dropped to genuflected knee, swung jackboots behind himself, and keeled sideways to a reverberant stir of echoes which sprouted from the man's unremarkable floor. The squid disentangled itself from the news-bearer's aghast and warped visage, unpicked the octagonal riddle of its billowing arms from the time-stilled corpse, and orbited its high-domed helmet back toward the man, who half-hunkered down, most vulnerable and vague, waving palms of placatory protestation as the cephalopod manoeuvred ever nearer.
'Please. Please.' The man whined, the man keened, the man chittered. 'Please. I intend you no harm. I've never intended you harm. I only wish to reciprocate the affection, the passion and patronage, grace and goodwill which you privileged me. I only wish to come to understand you.'
The squid squirmed past the man, clattered toward the ottoman, and eased itself up onto the lime decline of the lounge's untended cushions. It merely sat, it merely flowered, it merely blinked. The man ran hands, puzzlingly, through the chaff of his sultry Irish hairline.
'Well,' he grunted illuminably to the squid. 'The milk's there. Go on,' he said. 'Have a lap.'
About the author:
Kirk Marshall is a Brisbane-borne writer, freelance illustrator, independent filmmaker and mobilized environmentalist relocating to Melbourne, by way of Kanagawa-ken. He has recently self-published and distributed, "A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953", a 2007 Aurealis Award-nominated full-colour illustrated graphic novelette, which is available for purchase from independent outlets throughout Queensland. Kirk was awarded a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing) with Distinction from the Queensland University of Technology, and for the past two years has both worked as an activist for The Wilderness Society and as an English-Language conversation school teacher.
© 2009 Word Riot
