A Memory of Extinction
by Kade Morgan
Kade Morgan is a creative writing major at Western Washington University. They are an introverted bartender obsessed with ghosts, cats, hot-beverages, and overly spicy snacks. When not writing, they can be found languidly walking at midnight through the backstreets of suburbia, chatting with friends.
There’s an octopus painted on the wall in blown-out strokes of spray-paint, with long, liquidy limbs and big, gaping suckers. It’s blue and green and orange and stands out against the crumbled gray building it adorns. You don’t pass it a second glance. I can’t stop looking at it and thinking about your tiny hands and how gentle you used to be.
The last time you or anyone else saw a real-life octopus was on your third birthday. You told me recently that you can’t remember anything before age 7, but I think that’s understandable when you consider how trauma fucks with memory, especially in children, and when you consider how the world as we knew it, as you had only barely known it, was ending.
I remember how you reached out with your little, puffy fingers and ever-so-softly ran them over the slimy, slick body. The octopus didn’t move as you did: once, twice, and a third time, carefully petting it so as not to disturb or harm this creature that had you so enthralled. I remember wondering if the octopus knew you meant no harm—you were an unusually sensitive child, and you understood the preciousness of life far more than most adults. Octopuses are intelligent, after all. They have a good memory.
It’s a shame you don’t remember. And it’s a shame there are no more octopuses, and there never will be.
There’s a body slumped at the base of the spray-painted building. Arms slack, palms up, chin on chest, legs spread straight out. There’s a patched-up backpack beside it. You dart towards the body while I hang behind and scan our surroundings to make sure we aren’t caught unaware. After a minute, you make it back to me with the worthy contents of the backpack held in your arms. I looked back and saw you had knocked the corpse over in your haste to loot the body and bag.
I cringe.
You hold up two ziploc bags full of nuts and dried fruit and your teeth are yellow as you smile and say, “Sucker had two unopened trail mix bags with him. Must’ve had a shit immune system for the Contagion to kill him before he scarfed ‘em.”
I swallow the lump collecting at the base of my throat.
“We don’t refer to the dead as suckers, Emil. Maybe he knew his time was coming and thought it was better to leave his food for someone else to come by and take—someone like us.”
“Sure. Whatever. I’d definitely scarf ‘em down if I knew I was about to go. Might as well die full.”
With your skinny, scratched-up fingers, you shove the loot into your own backpack and turn to leave. I look one last time at the octopus on the wall and the body that rots beneath it. I wonder if they ever saw a real octopus before they went extinct. I wonder if they thought the painting was as pretty as I do, and so they chose to die there below a rare expression of a brightly colored world now desolate, now dust gray.
