We have cuttlefish in our world, of course. But they all came from Fairyland, just the way your restless narrator came from the west coast of her country, but made her house on the east coast of it. Nothing like cuttlefish can happen without magic. Cuttlefish are extremely intrepid explorers, and they came to our oceans seeking newer, ruder jokes and found they liked it quite well. September thought something that handsome ought to have a fancy name, like the Reef and the brass ball in Meridian and even she herself did. But a cuttlefish is such an astonishing thing that giving them a frilly title would be as silly as a peacock wearing a ball gown.
A Monkfish with a face colored like candy canes walked peacefully among the coral. You’ll notice I did not say he swam. He used his brawny tail to walk in a shuffling fashion, the way human monks sometimes do. He had once been told by a fisherman that it was much holier to move that way. Honestly, that fisherman had gone a bit mad. But if you squint, you can see it his way: Whatever is hardest is often holiest.
“Hello,” September said shyly. Radiant things made her shy in the same way that selfish things made her cross. Probably the cuttlefish couldn’t even hear her inside Fizzwilliam.
The cuttlefish answered by rearranging the lights on her lovely striped skin into a glimmering image, all fuzzy at the edges: an ultraviolet child running up to a neon yellow child and leaping into their arms so hard they both fell over into an absinthe-colored puddle. Hello.
Saturday smoothed his topknot without quite knowing he’d done it. Everyone wants to impress cuttlefish, which is perfectly all right because cuttlefish love to be impressed. She turned her glittering, mournful eyes to the Marid. He longed to stroke the creature and tell it all was well, really it was. “I want you to meet my wife, September,” he said in a voice too soft to bruise the sensitive creature any further.
How far will we have to go with this? September thought. I’ve only just made it back to seventeen years old—I don’t want to accidentally trip and fall and get up married.
The cuttlefish’s skin flushed pale, erasing the leaping neon children. Several images flickered by: a vermilion hand with a ring on the left finger, a coppery Fairy leaping over a broom, an azure arm with tattoos snaking around it. Weddings are nice.
Hugger-Muggery tapped her tentacles impatiently against the staghorn coral. “Get on with it! Poseidon save me from the slowness of hedgehogs. She came to get inked.”
September rolled her eyes. “For crying out loud, I’m not a hedgehog. That’s not even close!”
The Octopus Assassin squinted her bulging eyes. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
The other flame-bright octopi released the Bathysphere from their snaking arms. Fizzwilliam floated free. September could feel his relief tingling in her hands and feet. Saturday kicked his long legs twice and drew up close. He put his cobalt hand on the glass of the Bathysphere.
“If she accepts you,” he said, “then the Sea accepts you, and you’ll be part of the family. Able to share all we have, so long as you share what you have. We make our lives into a potluck dinner—everyone brings their best with lots of pepper and no one goes hungry. Or lonely.”
September searched his eyes for a conspiratorial glint. Show me we’re only playing, she thought. Wink at me. Raise your eyebrow. Tug on your ear. But she could see only Saturday, as he always was, earnest as the North Star, without a lie in his bones. September winked. See? Reassure me. But he only pointed at a bronze shaving cup on Fizzwilliam’s control board. The bottom of it had a fine mesh. A handsome shave brush with a wooden handle and lionfish-spine bristles rested inside. September picked it up. She had seen her father shave many, many times. She knew how it was done. But she could not think what the purpose might be. She hadn’t any whiskers. And the lionfish spines looked quite poisonous, all striped like a copperhead snake. She sighed. In for a penny, in for a purple cuttlefish. Whatever’s gotten into Saturday, he would never do anything to hurt me. But as she reached for the brush, September remembered Saturday’s shadow, pushing her into the Sea of Forgetting, not sorry at all, watching her sink down into the black.
Just as she had watched her father do in the upstairs bathroom, September swirled and squooshed the brush in the cup. Father, are you all right without me there to record your temperature and read to you when your leg hurts? Oh, please be all right! A bright foam slushed up from the spines, the color of the inside of an avocado, if it had caught on fire. She looked at Saturday questioningly. He only nodded at her—and there it was. A little wink. A wink that said: We will trick our way to the finish line, octopus by octopus.
The foam smelled of hot, unripe fruit and sizzling seeds that would burn your tongue. Mercifully, Fizzwilliam’s fresh, soothing voice filled her ears, telling her not to be a Suspicious Sue, that everything that made a Bathysphere run was squeaky clean and pure as a bar of soap milled on a summer cloud. Lionfish spines are only venomous when they’re attached, the Bathysphere explained. They have to want to poison you. It’s the wanting that makes the poison.
September felt a wonderful calm. She didn’t know why she hadn’t always consulted machines whenever something troubled her. They had such a comforting way about them. She gave the brush one more fatherly swish-swirl and blinked back tears of missing him and daubed it all round her chin and her chops and down her smooth, slender neck. She made sure to get her upper lip, for she had a horror of mustaches. Her father had grown one when she was four and she’d cried for a week because a stranger with a slug on his mouth was sitting in the good chair. One evening in the Redcaps’ Cellar, they had played Truth or Truth (you cannot dare much in prison) and Saturday had confessed that he could not grow a mustache or a beard, for Marids are part dolphin, and their skin will not cooperate. She had felt secretly joyful, and poured him a cup of red rum with extra cherries in without telling him why.
Tropical green foam dripped from September’s face. She looked down at the cup and the brush. Fizzwilliam began to tell her what to do, but somehow, she knew before he got four words out. She held the cup over her mouth and knocked three times on the bottom with the knob of the shave brush. At once, the foam hardened a little and the cup softened a lot. They flowed together and rippled out over her face in fine, sparkling trickles, like tears flowing upward. For a moment, fear stiffened September’s body like cold lightning cracking open every vein at the same time. The ooze crept up over her mouth and her nose, then into her eyes and her ears. She didn’t want to breathe it in, she would surely choke—but it gave her no choice. September breathed in—and she could breathe in quite well! She breathed in and felt the gunk toughen up, growing stiff and glossy. The wreckage of her first shave covered her whole head in a hard shell. She wore a beautiful copper-green mask sculpted into a perfect likeness of her own dear, familiar face, down to the mole on her left cheek and the last curls of her hair.
Fizzwilliam lowered his glass dome and the Sea spilled in, filling up his tub and swallowing up September as fast as a hiccup. The water rushed over September, colder than she expected, and heavier. It felt nothing like the rivers and lakes back home, and nothing like the Perverse and Perilous Sea, either. The Obstreperous Ocean held on to her tight. It felt like nothing so much as her own mother, holding her with firm hands in the public swimming pool when she was hardly more than a baby, keeping her safe and buoyant in the sun, showing her the marvelousness of water without letting her know how deep and dark such a brightness could get. The mask let her breathe like a Marid, and September had always been a wonderful swimmer. She frog-legged out of the Bathysphere and into Mumkeep Reef, feeling the salt water against her skin. The emerald-colored smoking jacket did not greet getting dunked with quite so much delight. It spoke urgently to the Watchful Dress, and the pair of them sleeked themselves down into a tight, smooth suit like sealskin, stretching to cover both fingers and toes.
The cuttlefish watched Sept
ember turn a somersault in the water, just for the feeling of doing it. She played all her colors across her skin, making mystic patterns of unguessable meaning, tsunamis of gold and rust and indigo, luminous galaxies containing all the wisdom of the infinite universe bursting open and drifting apart, then knotting together again into thick electric fists. September stopped her somersault and stared in awe. Tears rose beneath her mask. It was like looking at a star writing its last poem. Saturday’s chest ached for the endless, profound sorrow in the cuttlefish’s W-shaped eyes.
“I’m just kidding,” the cuttlefish said, and laughed uproariously. “I can talk! I just love to put on a show. You can take the cuttlefish off the stage, but you can’t pry the stage off the cuttlefish, am I right?”
September felt quite glad of the mask just then. A mask cannot show disappointment. “But the lights…,” she said. “The tsunamis, the galaxies…”
The cuttlefish preened, ruffling the veils along the sides of her body. “Pretty good, aren’t I? Would you say ‘a boffo performance’? What about ‘a tour de force’? Maybe ‘a star-making turn’? I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But I do need the love of the critics! The piping hot ardor of the audience! The generous salt of approval!”
“It brought the house down,” September said generously, though she still felt a bit cheated. But that is the way of theatre, girl. It is everything, and then the curtain comes down and all you’ve got left is a program and a half-eaten chocolate. But September did so love to give somebody what they wanted. Most of the time, it was much easier than holding it back.
“I’ll take that and live on it for a year, young penguin!” The cuttlefish smiled. This involved opening up her a face into its many thick, short tentacles and waggling them vigorously. It is rather hideous.
Hugger-Muggery leapt at the chance to prove herself the smarter of the two tentacled monsters present.
“She’s not a penguin! Even I know that.”
The cuttlefish oozed out of the coral a little to get a better look.
“She is flightless, can only breathe underwater for short intervals, and stands upright. I say penguin! And what I say goes. Young penguin, I am Sepia Siphuncle, at your service. Once, the greatest comedienne under the sea, star of the cephalopaudville stage! Now ridiculously retired tattoo artist living by her lights. You can call my Monkfish there Brother Tinpan. He was my stage manager in the good old days—days so good you only appreciate them when you’re old!”