no home for a kraken
BY CHARLOTTE TURNBULL
SECOND PLACE WINNER
Charlotte Turnbull’s no home for a kraken placed Second in The Wild Hunt Short Story Competition 2021 judged by author Helen McClory.
Once a month there is a mum’s writing group at the library and I never usually have anything to share, but my son wanted this colossal squid for his birthday and when it arrived, I thought – I can use this. This poor squid, I thought, 420 metres above sea level, landlocked in plush tangerine fur. And while I’m buttering toast, I tell the boy there was this article I read in the local paper about finding tiny remains of sea creatures here, on the moor, and how we would all have been under the sea in cretaceous times, but how it must have been a thin, revealing sea, not a dark, forgiving one; no home for a kraken. But then I look at his pale face and think – oh, what have I done?
Sometimes I wonder if the other mothers are only there to fill time. They write such lovely stories about their husbands and children and the spring and the autumn and a bird they once saw, whereas I begin:
This deep-sea predator is an ambusher in more ways than one.
It is so soft, though, this toy. Soft and giving, everywhere. (It travels by mantle and fin, the rest trails behind, so despite its mature heft it is weightless and dreamy in water.) It’s so soft that my son’s incredibly disappointed. Apparently, the tentacles should have hooks, to stop things drifting away; to pull things closer in. I can use this, I thought. I can use the two antennae that he’s always telling me are mistaken for tentacles. What’s the difference, I think, who cares? (They stretch out, you know, all around the flat. They’re always wherever I’m standing, and it’s only a one-bed so if I move an inch there are just another seven to trip over, and then when you add on the antennae etc…) But he cares, so, of course, we look it up. We run through the facts – maybe, three to forty times a day – and, oh, I can use this, I think, as he complains there is no beak where its beak should be, only the nylon sheath for your hand to go in. And while I struggle to think of this limp, orange puppet as anything other than starving to death without its evolutionarily-earned beak, I read about Abyssal Gigantism and how the females are so much bigger than the males and I do one of those exhales where the front of your own hair stands on end because – oooh – I realise I can definitely use this.
It hides in plain sight; its camouflage is the bioluminescence, the sparkle, that draws us in.
Today I palpitate life into this feeble beakless-maw for nigh on two hours just to get him into the car, and we’re always late, and they’re always understanding, and I’d leave the damned toy in the class with him, but the rest of them see it, still on my hand, tentacles swinging sadly, and don’t children have their own weird antennae for the salty tug of pathos because they gather around, and he hates people near him, so I stuff it up my jumper like the world’s meanest clown, with half of that bloody writing group watching me, and I’m thinking, well, should I use this?
It takes advantage of a natural instinct to pursue the unexpected and mysterious.
At night, my boy sleeps where his father once slept, flinging himself around, whipping me with the slender, flexible limbs I gave him. Do I want to use this? I wipe water from his brow as he wakes over and over. ‘Can you hear it?’ he weeps. And if I listen close, above all the crying, can I hear it? Dragging itself across the outcrops, crushing gorse, gripping granite, pricked by the anemone-stings of the pines, finding us gritted and wet as a sea bed, but gasping for breath nonetheless. ‘Don’t worry, sweetie,’ I say, ‘the threat was never the kraken – it was being dragged into the whirlpool the kraken leaves behind.’ A gargantuan hook impales a cherry-red Little Tikes car in the garden, and. Oh. What have I done?
but to know it fully you’d have to follow it down – choose the hooks, accept its immobilising embrace,
I don’t think they like me, those other mothers. They write controlled, precise sentences, beginning with the firm proclamation of capital letters, and ending with the deep breath of a full stop. We line up on grey, plastic, children-sized chairs in the library, and they stare down at my flailing motifs and analogies; punctuation drowning in frenzied gulps of words. The group turns away when I say that ‘kraken’ was originally a catch-all, used to describe all the many monsters of the sea, for fear that speaking their true names might summon them. I hide the rest of these notes, written on the back of an NHS outpatient’s appointment letter, in my bag, out of sight, because there are tentacles here, looping under and back again and again, until, look, a knot, around my neck. The hooks are drawing blood. If someone could just show me which ones are the antennae, perhaps – could I use this? But – wait, oh – oh. When did it get a beak –
– let it hold you fast in the awful, glittering black.
