Kraken by Natalie Teal McAllister
Associate fiction editor Nadine Rodriguez on today’s bonus story: “Kraken” washed over my mind through its cold, flowing words, and it was more than welcome to. With poignant imagery and crisp, pointed dialogue, the story turns fluid, slowly engulfing readers in its short, quiet unease.
Kraken
Imagine an ocean in her: not the ocean of dolphins nor the ocean of lapping tides nor a welling of easy emotions. This is the black ocean. A place below the depths of penetrating light. The realm of deep-sea gigantism, of cold waters and preserved monsters, unblinking eyes like dinner plates thousands of feet beneath the surface.
In these dark places, creatures lurk beneath passing ships, song-born whales, the glint of sun along a sea turtle’s shell, their tentacles poised to pluck what lives above the surface into the depths below.
***
She calls her creature Kraken.
On the morning he reawakens, she feels him stretch to life inside her. Trees hum with birds and children chase sun-soaked dogs along the sidewalks. At the kitchen table, Alice’s daughter cuts out hearts from construction paper. She glues on to them magazine snippings of elaborate birds, mascaraed eyes, octopus arms, hands reaching and hands holding.
Alice leans over the toilet as Kraken twists in her stomach. His stirrings are goldfish in her belly. He is rapping against the walls of her skin. Already his tentacles touch the spaces between her heart and lungs. The girl holds her hair and together they watch as she retches nothingness into the bowl. Black stains have collected at the rim and she reads the shapes of them like tea leaves. How many months has it been since she truly scrubbed things clean?
“It’s a baby?” Her daughter asks. The girl is desperate to nurture something. Alice wonders which of them is the better mother—is it her, or is it this child?
“No baby,” she says. The words are forced out of her and into the toilet.
He grows so fast these days.
***
By the second morning, she can feel the twist of him wrap around her smallest rib. He is a weight within her. Too heavy to move, she sinks into the couch and watches as her daughter blows dandelion heads in the yard. The girl glides her arms through a tide of seeds.
There is no pattern to him, no cadence: once he awoke beneath a cascade of warm clouds scattered above her. Once he awoke while brilliant blue birds sang outside her kitchen window. Once he awoke as children chattered and laughed and spoke their quiet playground languages around her.
By nightfall, lightning bugs pierce the evening. Her daughter wanders in a curtain of flickering pins of light. She lifts her shirt to hold a gathering of rocks, her belly exposed. Alice watches in horror as the imprint of suckers appears beneath the girl’s skin.
Once he made room for this child inside her. He rocked her, too—and when she was born, together they mourned the empty cove in Alice’s body. He had held Alice tight, the embrace of him filling that void until he had nearly drowned her.
She’s been too kind to him, too patient. She never tried hard enough to get rid of him. Alice gathers her running shoes and imagines the jostling of him as the secret to detaching his suckers from her insides. She leans over to tie her shoes and a swell of sour liquid floods her throat. He stirs.
She double knots her shoes and pulls herself outside to the long empty streets. She has been told to fear bushes and the gaps between buildings, empty stairwells and the night, but monsters are what we make them and she believes this.
Her first steps are like wading through a stiff tide. She shuffles along the ocean floor. A minivan passes and the woman inside waves, then floats away. Kraken turns over and presses the bulk of his mantle into her diaphragm. Her breath falls short. The ocean’s tide pulls against her.
She has come so far and yet her daughter has watched everything from the blank stoop behind her.
***
In the morning he slides one tentacle around the base of her throat, around her trachea. She stands before the mirror, naked and slack-bodied and raw from the flashing heat of the shower. She watches the contortion of her skin in horror. Pressing her finger into the softness of his flesh under her flesh.
He is naughty and ruthless and jealous. He wants all of her. Touch me, his tentacles say. Love me. He will take everything he can and yet she finds her hand holding the base of her belly.
Her daughter has come in and now stands beside her in the mirror. A small reprint of herself. In the girl’s reflection a whole tentacle appears under her skin, the suckers pressed as if searching.
“The baby?” her daughter says, reaching out her delicate hand to Alice’s torso. Can she feel him moving? Can she feel him roll his tentacles against the forgiving flesh of her belly?
“No baby,” Alice says, but this seems to enrage him. He clutches her throat tighter. He is clawing marks into her sternum. She places both hands on her belly. “Shhhhhh,” she tells him.
Her daughter is watching.
It’s water he needs—this is where he feels safe. Where he will be quiet. She draws a bath, turns the water as cool as she can tolerate, cool as the bottom of the ocean. Her daughter cradles the tiny creature in her own belly, rocks and loves it, the newness of finding something whole inside her.
The cold creeps in. This arm is numb, that leg. Her teeth chatter and yet she feels nothing but the soft rocking breaths of the nestled life inside her.
Natalie Teal McAllister is a fiction writer based in Kansas City. Her short fiction appears in Glimmer Train, No Tokens, Columbia Journal, Pigeon Pages, Midwestern Gothic, New Flash Fiction Review, Craft, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others, and her recent Cheap Pop micro appears in Best Microfiction 2020. Natalie spends her writing hours engulfed in several novels and assorted strange stories.
