Most Don’t Survive by Harrison Cook
Associate editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus essay: Cook’s thrilling, singular sentence micro essay on seahorses brims with celestial images and effervescent textures, peeling back all of the strange and wild layers embedded in a particular moment under the sea.
Most Don’t Survive
Here, the seahorse’s sanguine tail is not his main mode of locomotion; he relies on his dorsal fin, fluttering sixty times per second, a whirr of skin meets the human eye; pectoral fins on both of his sides steer him forward through the brackish water; contorting his skeletal armor, his spiraled arm rolls and flexes around the water like a human hand wraps around a shovel’s handle to dig up a plot; while constricting his tail around some plastic shrubbery at the sea floor’s bottom, his color changes, first brick brown, then black banana, then see-through-inside-out-green, bunkering down on the seaweed, he convulses in heavy sets, fins his way upright—thrusting—readjust—thrust—just to knock himself back into the rock of the anchoring plant; he chews the water in—out—in before spraying geysers of his own spawn, propelled by open abdomen push like a meteor screaming into Earth’s atmosphere, chased by two wisping tails, one made of dust, the other plasma, breaking into flecks of rock, not upon impact, but sailing through the air so hot the heat around the meteorite melts the perimeter of the space rock to thin black glass, squelching upon the water’s impact, sinking through a cloud of the sea horse’s kids, with the seahorse curled rock-tight-resting on the ocean floor, neither of them, the meteorite or the sea horse, prepared for the floating, partially dissolved Q-tip.
Harrison Cook is the Deputy Managing Editor at Guesthouse and a Contributing Writer at Hi-Fructose. His work has appeared in Gay Mag, Foglifter Journal, Essay Daily, The Normal School, Slate, and elsewhere. His piece “Atlas,” was recognized as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2021.
