Year of the Snake

Octopus in the Freezer

25 Octopus in the Freezer What could you possibly have been dreaming of as you slumbered coiled there, tentacles furled about your large soft brow, bashful and pink, ruminating in the back corner beneath an arched shelf of antelope ribs— snugged between headless-bodied broods of sage grouse, the icy bright pillows of Shur-Fine lima beans, and the buttered currency of carrot medallions? What were you thinking down there in my parents’ basement, blue blood’s pulse stilled to a wiry tangle of navy ribbon, the syncopated bongodrum thump and thrum of your three hearts on break between sets and resting silent on the stage? By what unlikelihood were you frozen solid in this tightly-wound pose, like a multi-limbed Hindu goddess in lotus position, riding the plains by freight truck to Sakura Square in Denver, where my mother admired the brawny circumference of your arms, the snow-white firmness of your inner flesh, the rubbery erect grip of your suction cups? And what were the odds that you’d be packed in dry ice by the ojii-san behind the counter, tucked into our avocadogreen Igloo ice cooler and driven home across the state line to Wyoming? You remain frozen in time in my parents’ freezer—totemic, statuesque, infinite and apocryphal—even though you’ve been eaten many times over, one arm at a time, sliced thin into cross-sectioned slivers 26 for sushi on birthdays and holidays. As a child, I used to think the dull muffled thud and clunk of the furnace firing into life at night was the sound of your head bumping up against the freezer lid, the cold grate and clash of meats shifting, scraping against one another in the wake of your thrashing tentacles’ lash and whip. What error in judgment took you from your cozy niche, your eclectic garden arranged with such compulsive precision: the slender-necked and lush-hipped wine bottles, the shiny winking bits of mirror startling back your placid mild eye, the pickle jar whose lid you loved to screw and unscrew—dangling in a tapered arm, your exquisitely sensitive, ganglia-rimmed suckers quivering, to check for tasty things to eat? Did you become snarled in a fisherman’s net, or clasped tight in the steel embrace of a lobster trap—caught in the careless kleptomania of your endless lust for crustacea? And did your chromatophores pulse first white, then red, to semaphore the blushing flush of fear flaming to anger? Were you caped in a smoky swirl of spewed blackness dispersing the way sumi-é ink curls away from the tornado whirl of a horsehair brush being twirled clean in water? Today the snow just falls and falls, and I think of you as the relentless volatile wind lifts the flakes into blinding, shimmering white veils that spiral and mist—so cold the fine spray delicately burns for one moment against the skin, and frozen feathery etchings are flung up against the windows like splayed bits of goosedown. Cars and trucks cough and come 27 to a halt, my back door freezes shut. The barometer drops and empty wine bottles line the kitchen counter like bowling pins. How odd, I keep thinking to myself as everything around me creaks and groans and shivers, then stills to ice and frost. How odd that it has all come to this. And then I wish for someone, anyone at all, to dream of me, if only for a moment, to unfurl my rigid aching limbs and melt down all my hearts, taste my salt on their tongue, let ice transubstantiate to breathing flesh, and resurrect me back into the living again. ...