Literary Orphans

And Hadn’t the Octopus Been Crying? by Doug Cornett

To be in the middle of a psychotic break is one thing, certainly. Yes, these things happen and what’s to be said? But the wailing child, the poem, and the crying octopus. On this of all days. You know this here is a sign. This: it’s all connected.

 

The wailing child, bereft in the indie mag aisle, plank-straight with arms stabbing downward, fingers lacing outward like, yes, tentacles.  With his head bent back and his mouth open, some kind of adolescent warrior bird, traumatized feathers, the rhythmic clucks of his crying like gashes in the vestal quiet of the bookstore.

 

And hadn’t the octopus been crying? The one you’ve just seen splayed out not ten minutes ago in an aisle of the Korean grocery across the street? Wasn’t that the cause of the wetness around it, the puddle on the floor? Or had he been dropped by a clerk who’d gone mop hunting? Wasn’t there something, yes, child-like about this octopus? Those needy eyes. That blinking faith in everything.

 

And all this, in the bookstore, in the indie mag aisle, in front of the new issue of the glossy-covered journal that you came to buy or at least flip through, the issue that comes out today and features the poem your childhood best friend wrote and sent out a mass email about. And maybe, you thought, maybe the poem is about me and that I am grounded after all, I’m someone who can be written about, I’ve made it. Maybe it’s not about me but it’s to me, or maybe I can conjure meaning from its opaque scramble. Because after all, you are a work of art yourself.

 

They come to you, the exact words that you should say to the wailing child: Don’t You Know They Eat Octopuses Alive?

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Doug Cornett is a writer and high school teacher living in Portland, Oregon. He won the 2015/16 William Van Dyke Short Story Contest from Ruminate Magazine, and work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Lime Hawk, Sequestrum, Permafrost Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a monthly blogger for Ploughshares.

DOUG PORTRAIT

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Art by So-Ghislaine

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