By Light We Knew Our Names

by Anne Valente

  Dr. Carver will operate soon, Walter told Roseline that night, over dinner plates filled with noodle stew. On Peabody too—he’ll know the count of one hundred. I can’t keep him hidden forever.

  Peabody? Roseline blinked, noodles suspended on her fork.

  Walter sighed. Our little shapeshifter.

  You named him?

  They were only three words, but he knew then what Roseline did. He’d become attached, just like Sedna, and like baby after baby until Roseline finally said enough, no more names and no more trying, we will just have to let this go.

  Walter set down his fork. I don’t know what to do.

  You’ll figure it out. Roseline touched his arm. I have faith in you.

  Walter watched her across the table, that word faith, what it could possibly mean. He’d been as incapable of stopping the death of one lone octopus as he’d been an entire bevy of lost children, failed births. Walter stared into Roseline’s eyes and strained to see their corneas, small retinas, what prism refracted the complicated ways that love bent and illumined itself, and how it looked from the other side, the impossible perspective of a heart not his own.

  After Dr. Carver locked up the labs the next day, moseying past Walter’s room to tell him he could head home, Walter flashed a spare key, said he’d lock up himself after finishing the day’s notes. After the reverberations of the doctor’s footfalls fell silent, Walter pulled a plastic bag from his brief-case—not unlike the ones he’d used as a child, to take goldfish home from fairs—and slipped Peabody inside, bright crimson through the tide of water, then a little red balloon circling the bag, irate in his new environment.

  Walter strapped the bag into the passenger seat, too small for full protection by belt buckles, and glanced over at stoplights, a red cloud still blooming through the bag, as if Peabody held his breath in ruby-cheeked protest.

  At home, Walter moved quickly to the frog pond, unable to wait for Roseline. He untied the plastic bag and unfolded its contents through the ripples of the shoreline, watched Peabody float a moment as if confused, tentacles stretched out into the strangeness of vast water. His color shifted quickly, cherry red to cobalt blue, and he zipped away into the water, so fast Walter thought his small organs might have seized beneath the weight of new surroundings, but then a fountain-like squirt shot up from the center of the pond, a spray from Peabody’s tiny beak.

  When Roseline at last came home, she found Walter squatting by the bank as the sun dropped behind the trees, the frogs beginning to croak.

  Is that him? she asked, arm extended toward the pond’s center, where an egg-sized flash of blue splashed playfully through the water.

  That’s him. Walter watched as two frogs kicked their way toward Peabody, curious.

  Roseline sighed, and Walter wondered if she disapproved. But she stooped down beside him, troubled the water with her fingers.

  You did a good thing.

  Roseline rubbed his back and headed inside, and Walter watched the trees swallow the last of the sun, a death stained in streaks across the marbled, darkening sky.

  Walter watched Peabody swim, mornings before work and some evenings beside Roseline, their mugs of tea steaming ghosts. Peabody grew quickly, no longer confined by the edges of fishbowls, and propelled himself around the pond, sometimes floating along the banks to absorb the last of the sun, and other times poking the frogs with wonder, tentacles pulsing lemon yellow when they responded and played.

  One morning when Walter opened the doors of his lab, Dr. Carver stood inside, holding a needle over a fishbowl. He looked up for a moment, sharp tip poised above water, then pushed the needle slowly into the trembling octopus’s head.

  A dye injection, Dr. Carver said, pushing fluid through the syringe. It will color the brain so we see what we’re operating on.

  But they’re not ready yet. Walter dropped his briefcase and stared at the small octopus, tentacles shuddering. They’re still babies.

  All the better. Dr. Carver pulled the needle from the fishbowl. Now we can see how love begins.

  Walter stood, stuck to the floor tiles, while Dr. Carver moved around the lab prepping steel instruments, waiting for the dye to soak through cells. Walter stared at the eyedropper on his desk, a daily duty of care, inconsequential, meaningless now. Dr. Carver pulled the octopus, now immobile, from its tiny snow globe and pinned its tentacles to the bed of a Petri dish, filled with just enough water to keep it alive, the top of its head exposed to air.

  Walter looked away when Dr. Carver made the first incision, an exactitude of scalpel through membrane and tissue. Without vocal cords there were no screams, but Walter imagined them anyway, piercing shrieks that percolated the nerve endings within his arms, spread down the length of his legs. He envisioned the vertical lobe that Dr. Carver penetrated, so close to the insular cortex—the center of pain for both humans and invertebrates, of unanaesthetized sensation, of heartbreak.

  When Roseline walked through the front door that evening, Walter sat in an armchair, room dark, every light extinguished as dusk spread through the windows and across the floor.

  He sacrificed an octopus today. Walter looked up at Roseline. This started too soon. They’re still so young.

  Walter felt a pressure then, some darkened cloud filling the space beneath his ribcage, ballooning through his lungs. He closed his eyes, blinked it back—what ineffable pain radiated on the shared wavelength of words, as if ejecting them into air was the only catalyst that made sorrow real.

  You can’t save them all. Roseline stood before him, bent down and touched his face. This isn’t your fault.

  Walter gazed at her cheeks, just shy of her eyes. He strained to see skin cells, blood coursing beneath them, the way they could brighten and stain her face red, when she laughed too hard, or when she lay flushed and still, just after they made love.

  After dinner, as Walter scrubbed the dishes, he heard the back door open and bang shut, and found Roseline at the edge of the pond, hugging her sweater around herself, breath clouding in swirls. He watched as she threw shrimp in the water, pulled from the freezer inside, and let them thaw on the pond’s ripples until Peabody pulled them under.

  Walter stood beside her. Her shoulders came only to his chest.

  Why do you love me?

  She threw another shrimp. Because I do.

  He considered this, what reason or logic might hide in three words, and stared out above the pond toward the pockmarks of stars, pinpoints letting in light. Walter felt blind, unable to see them, and closed his eyes where the dots of a thousand octopuses swam against black, all the particles of children that never were.

  I am not a good man.

  Walter opened his eyes and watched the water. He could not look at his wife. The doctors never said why, what mystery brought them here just to wash them away, but in the waiting room that last time he knew he’d failed her somehow, that maybe with another man, Roseline might have enfolded soft skin, tiny hands in her arms.

  Roseline set down the shrimp. She turned so she was facing him.

  You are the best of men.

  Her voice filled his rib cage, rattling against bone. Peabody crept to the shore, extended a short tentacle, touched Roseline’s ankle. She bent low and slid the remaining shrimp into the water, and as Walter watched her silhouette he yearned to know what was it that brought her such calm, this other half of marriage, this impenetrable wall that slid beneath the shade of the known world.

  When Walter returned to the lab in the morning, Dr. Carver again stood near the fishbowls, suspended above them until he settled on one near the edge, plucked the rounded glass to transport onto the examination table.

  I thought yesterday was a test. Walter watched Dr. Carver pull the octopus from the water, pin it roughly against Petri dish.

  They’re ready, Dr. Carver said. They’ve been ready a long time.

  Walter tried, but could not look away. He watched as Dr. Carver pushed the last of the pins through the octopus’s
waving tentacles, their tips curling and recoiling, attempting movement, failing. He watched Dr. Carver slide the needle through tissue and push the syringe, saw the octopus squirm and flinch. He watched the steel knives and scalpels come out, lined up along the tray. And he watched Dr. Carver slice through skin and organ, plunging the scalpel deep into the vertical lobe, even as the octopus blinked and trembled.

  Walter watched everything, stood motionless, waited until Dr. Carver at last pulled the scalpel free, until the octopus slumped unmoving and died.

  You’re a good man for observing. Dr. Carver snapped his latex gloves free, threw them in the trash can with the Petri dish. The more you pick up, the closer you’ll be to making these incisions yourself.

  Walter stared at him, imagined him driving home after work to what, he couldn’t guess—the image stopped there, blank and clear as the vacant sea.

  We’ll get it right, don’t you worry. Dr. Carver waved a hand over the rows of fishbowls. It’s not like we don’t have room for error.

  He laughed, rough sandpaper, and slipped out the metal doors. Walter listened to his footsteps recede down the hallway, standing immobile before the lines of fishbowls, watching their fluttering shapes, tentacles undulating like banners through the fluid of their tanks.

  Walter moved to the trash can, peeked over its edge. The Petri dish lay among the discarded gloves, biohazard waste, dirtied rags. Walter reached down and pulled the dish out, held the unresponsive octopus to his face, its limp body no bigger than a tiny, pale heart. Even without Peabody’s colors, shades to expose joy or sorrow, Walter could see that the octopus had died in pain. No tint or hue was needed, no dye to stain what was evident, there inside the octopus’s ashen tentacles, pallid suction cups. A center unknowable, one Dr. Carver would never find, the secrets of sea and land locked flush inside a safe, bolted tight.

  Walter slid the Petri dish into a plastic bag, tucked it securely inside his briefcase. He stared toward the fishbowls, watched their silent small vibrations in the water, heard the hum of the laboratory refrigerators, the oscillating currents of the ventilation system.

  Inside the laboratory closets, Walter found a stack of cardboard boxes, the same the fishbowls had arrived in. He laid them out on the floor, a hopscotch grid of boxes, then moved quickly to stow the fishbowls inside of them, covered with plastic wrap, packing tape, everything to transport them carefully away. He stacked them, one above the other, then steadied his briefcase on top, a tower of escape, of revolt.

  He waited until he heard Dr. Carver move into another lab, then hurried down the hallway, out the laboratory doors to the sunshine, to the bedrock shelter of his car.

  Through bumps and potholes, Walter heard the fishbowls rattle against one another, glass knocking glass inside his trunk. But he sped up anyway, moved hurriedly away from the laboratory until he’d at last arrived at home, threw open the trunk, and hastened the pile of boxes quickly around the house, through the backyard, toward the frog pond.

  Dr. Carver had surely stopped by the lab by now. As he pushed open the backyard gate, Walter pictured how wide the doctor’s eyes would be, the lab empty, all the fishbowls gone. He would lose his job, he knew. He would be fired, he would be free.

  But when Walter reached the pond, he stopped short, feet planted, gaze frozen. The weight of the boxes pressed down into his arms and he set them down and felt his entire body collapse, all haste expelled. A blackbird called from somewhere above, some high branch or tree, disembodied, every noise and hum fractured, skewed impossibly from grass, from bark, from prickled air on skin.

  There, in water once clear, floated hundreds of frogs, all dead, spots of color in a boundless pool of black. Emerald specks, points of light, a constellation made terrible, illumined by the night-dark torrents they drifted silently upon. Walter’s eyes moved over the mess, over what could have possibly happened here, and he moved toward the shore, crouched down and touched the water.

  His fingers came back black when he pulled them away. The shade stained the ridges, the patterns of his fingertips as ink would, ink for a lineup, ink for escape, for defense. Pure melanin, poisoning the water, ejected from ink sacs embedded inside Peabody’s intestines, small pouches filled with enough toxin to destroy a whole sea of predators, if the right impetus provoked. Walter scanned the water, finding only frogs upon frogs, but then he squinted, out toward the center of the pond, toward some floating texture, a black matching the water’s darkened midnight.

  Walter stood, strained to see, and his whole body went limp, his eyes closed upon their own aim when he saw what was there. Peabody, lifeless and floating, stained as black and dark as the water, tentacles curled around the drifting body of his mother. And Sedna, preserved by the cold water, unearthed from the clouded mud of the pond floor that morning as Walter stood by to watch another octopus perish in the lab, as Peabody poked curious at the mud, as he searched for frogs at play, found his mother instead.

  Walter sat upon a log, clasped his hands to his mouth. How stupid. He breathed, closed his eyes, remembered Sedna. What a careless mistake. How irresponsible, how reckless, how incautious he had been and now, all those frogs, Peabody’s colors gone, so much black.

  Walter opened his eyes, looked at the boxes. He imagined the baby octopuses, all ninety-nine of them, hovering and blinking in their bowls. He pictured all the other fishbowls still inside the lab, mollusks suspended in their small tanks, waiting. He stared out across the water. He held his head between his palms.

  When Roseline came home, she found him still and silent on the log, head bent inside his hands, the boxes stacked against the shore, briefcase still perched precariously on top.

  She stood, breath suspended, eyes pooling across the pond.

  What happened?

  Walter didn’t look up, to hear her say again, This isn’t your fault—he would shut it out and away until she met him eye to eye, until she finally breathed yes, you are not a good man, you are not the man I loved.

  But she only sat beside him. She pushed her palm across his knee. Her sweater rustled against the log, caught on the rough edges of bark. Walter listened to her breathe in and out, lung membrane, air sacs, cells. He felt her heart pulse through her fingers, through his jeans, just one muscle-strapped core instead of three but beating hard all the same, strong, steady. All the eggs, all the frogs, all the mollusks and unborn children and here she was, her solid shape, all skin and cell that masked what she’d hide forever, some impenetrable core she held beneath bone.

  What are we going to do?

  Roseline’s gaze swept the pond, the boxes, the frogs and floating dead.

  We will do what we can.

  Walter looked at her. He would fail, they would fail. Again and again. You can,t save them all, and he knew that, though his chest burned to even think it, every egg, every cortex aching sorrow. He exhaled. He fell into her weight. He curled his fingers around her hand and held her, cupped in the shelter of his palm, a separate world to climb inside, to be theirs, to be known.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The help, guidance, love, and support of so many people have gone into the creation of this book.

  Thank you to the editors who first supported these stories: Caitlin McGuire at Berkeley Fiction Review, Jake Adam York at Copper Nickel, Steven J. McDermott at Storyglossia, Laura Benedict, Pinckney Benedict and Kevin Morgan Watson at Press 53, Robert James Russell and Jeff Pfaller at Midwestern Gothic, Andrew Scott and Victoria Barrett at Freight Stories, Beth Staples at Hayden’s Ferry Review, Valerie Vogrin at Sou’wester, Chris Heavener at Annalemma, Stacy Bodziak at Bellevue Literary Review, Nick White and Alex Fabrizio at The Journal, Andrew Gray at CutBank, and Rebecca Morgan Frank and Barrett Bowlin at Memorious.

  I am deeply indebted to the amazing team at Dzanc Books: Dan Wickett, Steven Gillis, Steven Seighman, Guy Intoci, Jeffery Gleaves, and Michelle Dotter. Thank you for everything, and for your support and faith in this book. It is truly a dream realized to work with each
of you.

  My gratitude will be lifelong for the group of colleagues, mentors, and friends at Bowling Green State University, who saw these stories in their earliest forms. Wendell Mayo, Theresa Williams, Lawrence Coates, and Michael Czyzniejewski: thank you for your instruction and close guidance. Megan Ayers, Alison Balaskovits, Matt Bell, Joe Celizic, Brad Felver, Dustin Hoffman, Brandon Jennings, Catherine Keefe, Stephanie Marker, Aimee Pogson, Jacqueline Vogtman, Jessica Vozel, Bess Winter, and Michelle Zuppa: thank you for your feedback and friendship. Thank you as well to Callista Buchen, Noah Buchen, Nikkita Cohoon, Ian Cohoon, Seth Fried, Brad Modlin, and Stokely Klasovsky. I am honored to know each of you, in perpetual awe of your talents and kindness, and forever grateful for our time in the long light of northern Ohio.

  Thank you to the communities at the University of Utah and the University of Cincinnati for their continued support and dynamite talents. Thank you to Lareese Hall for informal workshops and inspiration. Thank you to Brittney Stone and her family, and to Molly Patterson and Marissa Rosen. I am lucky to have grown up with you.

  Thank you to my extended family, to the loving memory of my grandparents, and to my new family, Jeff Heine and sweet Noa.

  Thank you to my parents, Michael and Maureen, and to my sister, Michelle. There are no words, even if my life is a striving to find them. You are my foundation. Thank you for your unwavering love and support, your goodness, and for showing me every magic this world can hold.

  Thank you to Josh Finnell, first reader, partner in wonder and the magic I found: you are my reason for everything.

  The Dzanc Books rEprint Series

  The Dzanc Books rEprint Series is dedicated to publishing great works of contemporary literature that are deserving and clearly will benefit from having their work appear in electronic form. Our efforts include works that have recently gone out of print, books in print that have yet to be converted to e-form, as well as titles where the author holds the eBook rights and is looking for a publishing partner for the electronic version of their book.