buffet
They came out of the water in hordes, the octopi. One foggy morning, sometime between spring and summer when the air was moist and every morning waves of fog rolled in to clear away the pollution, they came, out of the water in their armies. They were huge, larger than anything we’d ever seen, and they were angry. It didn’t take them long to learn how to walk faster and then they were really terrifying, slithering and rippling over the land faster than we could run.
And we did try, at first. To run, I mean. Well, not everyone. Some people tried to fight. They brought out their guns, their knives, any weapons they could think of, but it was pointless - the octopi had their own weapons, their own methods, and anyone who resisted was swept up in nets they cast out like so many fish. They were carried away by others, who slid back into lairs and dens with their prizes bundled up in strange mesh bags that chafed our limbs and cut off circulation.
Some of them seemed to talk, communicating through waves of undulating color and slow movement. Stretching out a tentacle here, crouching lower to the ground there. It was beautiful, in a terrifying way; they looked like rippling, rainbow-colored gods descended to earth. They came in all different sizes - some giants, trampling cities with suckers and delicate skin; some medium, rolling over houses, leaving paths of beautiful destruction. There were even a few tiny ones, the size we were used to, who came in packs, clustered together for protection under the giants.
On the first day we ran, scattering like rats from our smog-filled cities and manicured lawns. We hid in ditches, forests; in backlit alleyways and all the forgotten corners of society. We hid from them, from their armies and nets; whispers of what they’d done from people who had escaped spread through the remnants of our civilization.
Some said they boiled people alive in huge silver pots. They came back with stories; how they hung in the heat and the steam and prayed they weren’t next, how whole bags of people were tossed in alive, wailing, but the octopi didn’t hear the screaming. If they did, they pretended not to listen.
Others told us, the survivors, that they ate some people alive, bit off their legs and arms and held them, screaming, in their tentacles. The people waiting, trapped, in their mesh bags could do nothing but sit on the side and watch through the holes of the bags.
People said the best way to go, the most merciful, was to be killed first, before preparation. But most were prepared alive, for reasons we could not, at the time, understand.
No one knew what to do, at first; only a few survived the initial scourge, and most of them huddled in corners and did nothing. The governments tried to regroup before they returned, threw away their old alliances, united under a common cause - but they made the mistake of putting one too many former rivals together, took one day too long, and the octopi were back, sweeping their tentacles over their pitiful half-formed fortresses, destroying the old, reinforced bases they were so proud of in seconds.
One day, a little boy, his tiny body tossed by winds, came to the octopus lair alone, holding a seashell, following a crab; the octopi welcomed him with kindness.
Among the camps of survivors most called him traitor, but some sent their children, praying for their survival - sent them blindly into the lairs clutching seashells and crab legs. These the octopi refused; choked them with smoke until they died or locked them into strange glass cages to watch and poke and laugh at.
The little boy was seen again, occasionally; escapees would report: He lives with them now, among their strange rock nests and pools of warm water. He’s one of them, no longer one of us; he has left us. And to themselves, they thought: Should we have done the same?
The little boy lived with the small octopi, played with the herds of tiny creatures and was protected by the giants that owned the den. They fed him things he could eat, good food, and let him roam wherever he wanted - except to their kitchens, to the sound of screaming people. They watched him, even when they had to crawl back out of water and stay out of water, laboriously breathing through their mysterious technologies but alive and watching him nonetheless.
Years passed and the boy became a myth, almost; something passed down through the survivors and their children, about the boy who lived with the octopi, with the enemy. Some believed he was dead, long dead, and that the rumors and stories were false, created to encourage betrayal and desertion from the meager but growing ranks of our side.
Because populations grow, expand, and our side was indeed growing, swelling in number with every decade that flew past. The octopi remained, living in our ruined cities and burnt capitals, a permanent presence to be wary of; but they no longer ransacked the corners of our world so vigorously, let our numbers grow unchecked.
But as we grew, so did our anger; so did our armies. As we grew, we planned attacks, strategies, created weapons; as we grew, so did our malice. So we planned, we grew, we developed - and exactly 30 years after their attack we began ours.
We amassed our forces on a cliff, one unified blob of people, connected under one cause, prevented from breaking apart by the hate of a common enemy. We had a representative, a leader; but that didn’t matter. We thought as one, lived as one, breathed as one - we were the army, the mob, the last of humanity ready and desperate for revenge for those 30 years of suffering. So we marched and stood, waiting, on that cliff, the wind cracking our lips and tossing our hair, the clouds graying out the sun and the sky, the rain softly pittering on our bodies, spreading icy drops of cold wherever it went.
We waited because we felt, despite our anger, the need to be able to say: we tried to compromise; we gave everything we had but it still wasn’t enough, so we had to do it. To be able to tell our children: We fought the good fight; we were in the right.
But we shouldn’t have worried about that. History is always told by the victors in the end. We were short-sighted and angry and proud, so we stood on that cliff in our ignorance and waited until a giant emerged, tentacled and bumpy and foreign to us, horizontal eyes and delicate soft membrane pulsing gently.
It was the first time we’d seen them without the goggles of fear or panic; and to many they were beautiful, despite the hatred we bore towards them. They were roughly silky, delicate, multicolored giants with gentle eyes that watched our army mutely.
We, by comparison, lacked their delicacy; lacked the subtlety of their form and the nuances of their beauty. We, standing on that cliff, were lacking; and so we twisted the shame and judgment of comparison into simmering rage and jealousy. Jealous of their lives, their gentility; rage for the dead, against the murderers.
And we wondered. We wondered - why? The question we had all asked ourselves at some point during those 30 years, over and over - why? Why did they attack us, why did they ruin us, when we did no wrong, held against them no grudge? So to all of us, it came as no surprise when our leader stepped forwards, stood on the edge of that rock and asked them: why?
The octopus stepped forwards and lifted its tentacle, placed a figure on its strange not-shoulder. The figure of the boy, now a man, standing there watching us. Slowly, he spoke.
You ask them why. Why did they do this, why did they kill you? Why? Why did they boil you, eat you alive, kill you en masse and prepare you, feed you to their children - why?
How did we kill them? How did we eat them, prepare them, boil them alive and torture them, not for 30 years but hundreds, maybe thousands of years? They watched us, all that time, watched us take their friends and family out of the ocean, watched us boil them and eat them and salt and dry their bodies, watched and comprehended the horrors, watched us as we learned they could feel pain and kept eating them, watched as our glutton and our greed overtook our morality and we killed them and hung their corpses out to dry on clotheslines. They watched as we froze them, cut off their limbs, polluted their homes, killed their neighbors and destroyed their cities with sunlight, bleaching everything white. They watched as we impaled them on sticks and laid their bodies out to dry, watched as we cut them into pieces and put them into soup.
And you ask them why?
They do as we did to them, to their children, to their children’s children. So why should we now expect more?
The cliff was silent, for a moment, as the biting wind cut our hair and cheeks, as we all thought of a million things to say that fell short. Our leader stood, watching, waiting. Until someone spoke.
Well, I never ate octopus except once at a buffet.
Eleanor Hong
I do not begrudge the reader eating octopus in any capacity. Eating is part of life. But why do we torture them before we eat them? Boil them alive? Chew their legs off while they are still moving, feeling? There has always seemed to be something wrong to me about the way we torment these creatures, sensitive and intelligent as they are. A swift death is no problem, but why scald them to death in boiling oil? What is wrong with humanity that we have decided this is the best way to eat? And so I wrote this story; perhaps we would change our minds if our lives were treated as cavalierly. Or not. Maybe we never learn. I suppose that depends on you, reader. A WARNING: Some depictions of violence