THE CUTTLEFISH

Timmy rolled his wheeled janitors’ bucket and mop stand in front of Dr. Curwen’s office door, and gently pressed a fingertip to each letter of the doctor’s last name. Daddy had told him not to bother with the first two letters of the long names on each plaque attached to the blond wood doors—explaining to Timmy that the first two fingers in each doctor’s name wasn’t actually a part of his or her real name.

(“Then why they got it there, Daddy?” Timmy asked, semi-chewed peas falling out of his mouth, and Daddy said, “It’s like a ‘Mr.” or ‘Miss,’ or ‘Ms,’ or ‘Mrs.’ All grown-ups get them, but it isn’t an actual part of their name It’s a title…like your title is Mr. Timothy Lange, Third Floor Janitor at the Marine Research Labs. But your name is just Timothy—” “Timmy, Daddy.” “Okay, son, Timmy Lange. Now do you see why you only need to match fingers for the last name on the door markers? What did we figure out about the names, huh, Timmy?” “That on the…left we got a three finger door, that’s Dr. Lee, then the two-hands door for Dr. Rabinowitz, and then.…”)

Sometimes Timmy couldn’t remember the exact sequence of finger-names on each door, like the times when the hall ash-trays had too many twisted paper butts in them, and he had to break stride and carefully clean them out, or when somebody spilled something on the sand-color hall carpeting, and he had to squirt the clear funny-smelling stuff from the big white bottle onto the stain, then rub and rub until the stain wasn’t there anymore. Today had been a day when he got goofed up and wasn’t sure which door was coming up next. There was a dirty spot on the low-nubbed carpeting—somehow sand-color carpet didn’t make sense to Timmy; this place was a Marine research lab, and after Daddy told him that “marine” meant Sea Hunt and Flipper, and the old French man whose name Timmy couldn’t pronounce (his tongue, already too big for his mouth, got all twisted and knotted around the word) who went out in the water all the time, and even Timmy knew that water was blue, or bluish green when it sat in a big hole or took up a lot of space, so why wasn’t the hallway carpet blue too?—and Timmy had to squeeze out most of the clear white stuff from the bottle and rub and rub it until he got himself all turned around on the rug from his effort, and when he got up, he wasn’t sure which side of the hallway he’d been cleaning. So he had had to roll the janitors’ cart from door to door, matching fingers to door plaques, until he figured out which ones he’d cleaned and which ones he hadn’t.

Timmy was glad that no one was still around to see him goof up so bad; the few times he’d started working while the doctors were still in their offices, they’d look at him funny and make him wonder if his tongue had popped out of his mouth again or make nasty remarks that he pretended not to hear. It wasn’t nice, and when he told Daddy about it, Daddy just told him that no matter what sort of title some people had in front of their names, it didn’t make them better people. Maybe smarter, but better, no. Daddy ruffled Timmy’s short hair (Daddy would cut it real short because Timmy sometimes used to forget to comb it) and told him that he thought that Timmy was a good boy, that it didn’t matter about his big tongue, or the way he “read” with his fingers, that what a person’s insides were like was all that counted. Timmy hoped that Daddy was right, that the doctors who were unkind were maybe bad inside, or had their insides put in wrong, so that their minds and mouths didn’t work right sometimes. But just to be safe, he hung around the restrooms, making sure they were real clean, until he was pretty sure that all the mean doctors were gone.

Now that he had ticked off the letters of Dr. Curwen’s name, Timmy smiled broadly. He liked Dr. Curwen. And his fishies that looked like rainbows sneezing. Happily, he fumbled with his big brass ring of keys, searching for the passkey he used ten times a night, every night. He just had a hard time finding it each time, that’s all. Some of the doctors suggested that he “put a bow on it,” but Daddy had said to ignore them.…

Once he had the elusive key safely in hand, he spent another couple of minutes fumbling it into the tiiny slot under the knob (he had trouble putting little things in tiny places. The teacher at his special school had said, “Take your time, Timmy, you’ve plenty of time. Nobody’s holding a stopwatch over you,” but to this day, he sometimes looked up to see if the big stopwatch was silently ticking away over his short-clipped head) until the skinny metal key slid home. Having opened the lock, Timmy swung the door open wide enough for himself and his cart.

Timmy wasn’t too surprised to see that Dr. Curwen had left on the lights in his lab. Dr. Curwen was like Timmy…sometimes the old man forgot to do things, because of all the other things on his mind. Like the way Timmy used to forget to comb his hair sometimes because he was too busy thinking about how the sand-colored carpet at work should have been blue, so Daddy had got out the clippers and given Timmy an excuse not to comb his hair anymore, because how could he comb it once it fell on the kitchen floor? (Dr. Curwen, upon hearing from Timmy about his new quasi-military haircut, and why he got it, had solemnly told Timmy, “Too much valuable time has been wasted throughout the centuries on hair care, Tim. You are now a man with enviable free time on your hands. I envy you, sir,” and he ran hi knobby fingers through his shock of hair.)

If any of the other doctors had said that to Timmy, they would have made it sound mean, like when Dr. Hathaway (eight fingers) had called him “skinhead.” When Dr. Curwen said things, his faded gray eyes twinkled, and his smile was in his eyes, too. (Timmy had noticed that a real smile didn’t just come from the mouth.)

At the far end of the lab, Timmy saw the rainbow-sneezing fish, only Dr. Curwen called them “cuttlefish,” or sometimes a long, funny-sounding name, sepia officinalis, explaining to Timmy (as if Timmy were one of the doctors, and not the fellow who cleaned up after the doctors) that the word sepia was also used by people to describe a certain type of brown in, and ever since then Timmy had been extra careful with any pen he found which used brown ink—it might have come from his small friends in the tank. Sometimes, they stained the water in the big tank with clouds of dark billowing color, and other times they used plain old water to push their odd-shaped bodies around. Dr. Curwen explained that these fish were from the same family as the squid (Timmy didn’t know what a squid was, but nodded his head when he heard about it), because both “species” had ten feeler-like legs near their mouths. To Timmy, the cuttlefish legs looked more like wet feathers, trailing around their heads. Actually, the cuttlefish didn’t even look like fish—at least not the fish toys he used to float in his bathtub a couple of years ago, and not like the fish shown in his Children’s Bible Stories picture book back home. To Timmy, the cuttlefish were magical-looking…the first time he had seen them twist inside out (or so it looked to Timmy), shifting color and shape in a ripple of supple motion, he had dropped his mop and run out of the door, almost too scared to go back into the office and get his wheeled bucket. But the next day, he came early to the office, and timidly asked Dr. Curwen about the weird things in the tank. That had been almost two years ago, before Dr. Curwen figured out how to talk to the strange floppy fish in the tank. And last year, the doctor had figured out how to figure out what the fishes said back.

Not that they actually talked, like Timmy and the doctor did, using their mouths and making sounds come out. But Dr. Curwen told Timmy that the fish could communicate in a special way, not unlike the deaf people Timmy had gone to school with a few years back. Did Timmy remember how they used their hands and arms to say things to each other? Timmy nodded, intent on the shimmering globules of living color in the tank, winking at their big round eyes. Dr. Curwen said that he should have thought of it years ago, but everyone had assumed that cuttlefish change color and shape for the simple reason of scaring off potential predators…only after closely observing the fish, sometimes for weeks at a time, on a round-the-clock basis using both his eyes and video tape, he had learned patterns and responses in their shape and color shifting…and soon, just like in Timmy’s favorite movie, Dr. Dolittle, Dr. Curwen could talk to the animals! (Well, only the fish.…) Dr. Curwen confided to Timmy that the other doctors were skeptical (assuming as a matter of fact that Timmy would know what the big word meant) about his research, claiming that it was meaningless, that there was no biological “Rosetta Stone”” (Timmy had thought Rosey-what stone?) for him to make valid “translations,” and so on.…

Nevertheless, the government kept giving Dr. Curwen more money and soon the tank housing his watery subjects grew bigger, and changed. The tank that Timmy saw now was just a bit different than it was yesterday; there were even more wires attached to the clear surfaces of the tank with sticky pads, and the big screen which was still on, still crawling with five and six finger words that Timmy couldn’t figure out. In some places (as

Dr. Curwen explained to him one evening) the big words were surrounded by funny hooked thingies, pairs of [ ]s, that meant that the computer had added in a word that people could understand in place of a word which the fish “said” that had no human equivalent (another of Dr. Curwen’s mouth-filling big words). Dr. Curwen assured Timmy that the hooked-thingies-surrounded words were things that the fish meant to say after Timmy asked if the computer was putting in things that the fish didn’t really say, just because the computer thought they should be said. Daddy did that for Timmy a lot; he’d never let Timmy answer for himself if someone asked Timmy how he was doing, or what was “shakin’” or what Timmy wanted to order in the hamburger place on Saturday afternoons. Daddy would automatically answer for Timmy, as if Timmy couldn’t talk for himself, or didn’t know what he wanted to eat…sometimes, Timmy wondered if Daddy didn’t want people knowing that Timmy had a big tongue, that if he hid his tongue everything would be that elusive “all right” that Daddy mentioned so many times in connection with Timmy.

Timmy approached the tank and the attached screen, he looked hard, scrunching up his weak eyes, at the pale green lettering against the soft black background, remembering what Dr. Curwen told him about the hooked thingies not actually being a part of the word inside, thus not needing to be finger-counted along with the rest of the word, but it didn’t help him understand the flickering letters any better:

[SHAKE] LAND LARGE [SHAKE] ALL LAND [HERE] [UNDER] ALL [HERE] [SOON] LARGE [POWER] LAND [SHAKE] ALL [BROKEN] OFF [UNDER] [HERE] ALL [SHAKING] ALL [BROKEN] [HERE] ALL [SHAKING] ALL [BROKEN] [HERE] LARGE [CRACK] [UNDER] LAND LARGE—

All the letters and the surrounding hooked thingies meant to Timmy was just a lot of fingers counting up the unknown. Yet, he did wish he could read the big screen words on the screen, and could work the keyboard that activated the bank of many closely-bunched colored light bulbs (Timmy recalled Christmas window displays, and the bright lights on the trees in houses on his street), the keyboard the doctor used to make the lights blink on and off in seemingly random patterns that the fish interpreted as words, and messages. A couple of times, Dr. Curwen asked Timmy if he wanted to say anything to the fish, and shyly Timmy asked if Dr. Curwen could tell the fish for him that Timmy thought they were real pretty. As he did so, Dr. Curwen explained that the fish “like compliments,” and soon the fish began their rainbow gyrations, and words formed in wavering green on the dark screen, and Dr. Curwen carefully pointed out and read each word aloud:

[THANK] YOU [TIMMY] YOU [NICE] [LOOK] TO [US] [TOO] [WE] [AFFECTION] YOU [TIMMY]

That exchange made Timmy’s face go all red right up to his brush-topped scalp (he could see his reflection in the brightly lit, polished sides of the tank) and he mumbled, “Nah, you just makin’ that up, Doc.” The doctor said no, not at all, that the cuttlefish weren’t like people, despite the fact that they were intelligent, and attuned to the world (whatever that meant) and, most important, that they had different standards of what was beautiful, and what they found to be good in other creatures. “They don’t like Dr. Hathaway, either,” Dr. Curwen added with a sly smile, and then he and Timmy both began to laugh. Timmy even got to shake some special fishie food into the big tank for his new friends, the rainbow-sneezing fish.

Today, the cuttlefish kept on doing their bizarre move-talking, making more and more words flash by on the screen so fast they were only a cool green blur to Timmy:

—[BROKEN] LAND ALL LARGE [BROKEN] [CRACK] ALL [TO HAPPEN] [SOON] NOT GOOD LARGE [SHAKING] [SOON] [SOON] LAND TO BE [UNDER] WATER [SOON] LARGE [CRACK] [GET] [VERY] LARGE LAND [SPLIT] [AT] [CRACK] LARGE [SPLIT] [NOT] GOOD LARGE [SHAKING] [SOON] [SOON] [DR CURWEN] SAY NOT [GOOD] [WHY] [DR CURWEN] [EXPLAIN]—

as he worked cleaning the floor near the door, and dusted off the shelves. Suddenly, the screen went blank, and the fish (all six of them) propelled themselves away from the sensory screen part of the tank, and all hovered in the water, facing Timmy. Pausing in his work, Timmy said out loud, even though he didn’t think they could hear him (but didn’t some of those deaf kids at the special school read lips?), “Hi, fellahs! You want some fishie food? Want eats?” He took their frantic metamorphosis in their tank as a “Yes,” and walked over to the tank, box of fishie food in hand. Near the tank, behind a solid-based worktable, he saw Dr. Curwen lying on the floor, mouth open the way Daddy’s did when he fell asleep watching wrestling on the TV. A few tiny white pills were scattered around Dr. Curwen on the floor. When Timmy came near, the doctor weakly fluttered his eyelids (just like Timmy did when he was real tired) and fanned his blue-ribbed hands over the pills scattered around him, and he moved his lips but made no sound. Timmy saw that the doctor was already tired (he was an old man, older than Daddy even), and decided that he’d had enough sleeping pills already and didn’t need any more, so Timmy pried the tiny metal bottle (it sure didn’t look like Daddy’s sleeping pill bottle, but maybe doctor’s sleeping pills) out of the doctor’s dry, cool grip, and carefully picked up the tiny white pills, shaking his head while Dr. Curwen gave him begging looks. As he placed the white pills on the counter (luckily they were flat and didn’t roll) because he couldn’t manage the finer finger work to get them back into the bottle, Timmy solemnly told the doctor, “It ain’t good for you to take too many of these, Doc. You might get real sick and need your stomach pumped.” (Old Mrs. Coffey form down the street once took too many pills and the men in the big van came and took her and Daddy told Timmy they had to pump her stomach out then he told Timmy to never, never touch the bottles in the medicine chest in the bathroom, unless Timmy wanted his stomach pumped out too!)

Down on the floor, Dr. Curwen began to breathe funny, like Daddy did when he was nodding off in his big chair near the window, and Timmy said, “See, you don’t need no more pills…you’ll sleep real good now.” Timmy didn’t think that the floor was a very comfortable place to sleep, now that the doctor closed his eyes and began to make raspy breathing sounds through his nose, but since the doctor was asleep it might not be a good idea to wake him up and lead him to the couch. Didn’t Daddy get mad when Timmy woke him up o go and get him a glass of water because Timmy was scared to get out of bed after the house was dark? Dr. Curwen was always so nice to him Timmy hated to risk getting the old man mad. And it wasn’t like the floor was cold, so maybe it was okay to let him keep sleeping on the floor. After all, it was his floor in his office. Dr. Curwen didn’t have a daddy to make him get up and go to bed, so Timmy decided to let him be. He just wouldn’t mop around the floor there and risk getting the doctor’s white lab coat and straggly white hair wet. He didn’t think Dr. Curwen would mind.

The fish had been watching Timmy tend to Dr. Curwen intently, finally stopping their fluid, colorful monologue. The task at hand finished, Timmy approached the tank, food box in hand, but oddly the fish didn’t seem interested—they all jetted over to the sensory panels, and began their shimmering rainbow dance anew. Behind Timmy, words flickered on the screen:

[TIMMY] [HELP] [DR CURWEN] HE NOT GOOD NOW HE [FELL] DOWN HE [HURTING] HE [NEED] [TO GET] UP [TO TELL] US [WHY] LARGE LAND [SPLIT] NOT GOOD [GET] [HELP] [GET] [OTHER] [DOCTORS] [GET] [DR HATHAWAY] [HELP] HIM [HELP] HIM—

And he turned around in time to see the hated Dr. Hathaway’s eight-finger name flash against the darkness of the glassy monitor surface, and he wondered if they were telling Timmy that they didn’t like Dr. Hathaway, that they really did like Timmy better. That was important; for he had sometimes wondered if Dr. Curwen was pulling his leg about what the fish supposedly said, but now he was happy in his new belief that the fish did like him better.

Overjoyed, Timmy shook down the food into the tank, where the flakes floated down in lazy, slow spirals. The minute agitation in the water made the half-dozen cuttlefish turn around to look at Timmy, at his smiling face (he took pains to keep his danged old tongue in) and at his expression of utter joy. A couple of them attempted half-hearted color changes, then all hung quiet and limp-looking in the gently bubbling water, under the swirl of descending food. Their huge round eyes goggled at Timmy, and somehow, Timmy knew (sensed?) that the fish seemed sad. Dr. Curwen had one told Timmy that these fish, as far away from their natural habitat as they were, were somehow still in touch with their deep watery home, with the entire planet, as it were. They could feel the living vibrations of the earth, the minute-to-minute messages which the earth sent out to all living creatures—if only they were able to understand. That was what the doctor had been working on lately, or what he told Timmy he was doing; getting the fish to tell him what they felt, what the earth was “telling” them via subtle vibrations that men could not feel. The doctor got all excited, telling Timmy that part, explaining that the cuttlefish were like natural seismographs and I don’t know what else yet…but I’ll let you know more soon. They are so eager to tell me things! The more of our language they can figure out, the more they can tell me. You’d never dream they could be so articulate…such innate knowledge, such clear thinking. And emphatic, compassionate, too. Unbelievable! Methinks God put the wrong creatures in charge of the planet.” There was more too, something about how Dr. Curwen compared the actions of the cuttlefish to those of mammals in certain “stress situations,” but Timmy had had to go and clean up in the other offices, so he had left Dr. Curwen in mid-sentence. The doctor hadn’t seemed to mind.

Timmy wondered if maybe the fish could sense what people were feeling, too. But that didn’t make sense. Timmy wasn’t feeling sad…but then, he thought maybe I should be feeling sad? Like when Aunt Millie who Timmy didn’t even know because she had been in an old people’s home since he was two years old had died, and Daddy ended up yelling at him for not acting “right” in the funeral home. Timmy hadn’t known that it wasn’t right” to comb his hair during what Daddy called the “visitation,” and besides, it didn’t seem fair that he should get yelled at when he didn’t remember to comb his hair, and also get yelled at when he did remember to comb his hair. Even though his stranger aunt was long buried, and his long hair long gone, he remembered that Daddy had expected him to act like he was sad during the funeral, saying “She is dead, Timmy, and people are supposed to feel very sad when someone dies.”

As he watched the fish listlessly hover in their watery home, Timmy wondered if the fish were sad because of something they knew which Timmy didn’t, like with his Aunt Millie. A rare mental connection made him go back to where Dr. Curwen lay on the lab floor. He looked and looked at the old man, and gradually, as he rubbed a hand over his closely shorn scalp (making a faint bristling noise) Timmy reached a conclusion: the old man was not breathing anymore. Yet another connection was formed in his usually carefree mind: huis Aunt Millie wasn’t breathing in that big brown wooden box in the funeral home either…and she was old, too!

Suddenly sad (and a little scared, too), this time for real, Timmy looked about the lab for something to put over the doctor (just in case he was sleeping real deep, and got cold), finally settling on an extra lab coat, which he spread out carefully over the old man, tucking in the sides the way Daddy did not too long ago for Timmy, but leaving his white-haired head uncovered, just in case.

When he turned back to the fish, they were all rippling and color-sneezing over by the sensors, forming these words across the monitor:

[CAN] YOU [UNDERSTAND] US [TIMMY] [DR CURWEN] [MAY] BE DEAD [THE] LAND [SPLITTING] [CRACK] [MUST] [HAVE] SCARED HIM [IS NOT] GOOD [THING] WILL [HAPPEN] [SOON] HURRY [TIMMY] LEAVE [THIS] PLACE [GO] FAR OFF NO LAND [CRACK] [SPLITTING] FAR OFF [FROM] YOU [IF] [DR CURWEN] [IS] DEAD [NOT] GOOD [FOR] YOU [FOR] PEOPLE HURRY [GO] [TIMMY]—

A pause while the fish bobbed changelessly, then, as an afterthought meant only for each other, a last expression of futility:

[TIMMY] [CAN] NOT [UNDERSTAND] US HE [CAN] NOT [READ]—

Timmy watched the changing video display in puzzlement. They were talking to him, that much he could tell (he could read and write his name, laboriously in an ascending printed scrawl—it was a one-hand word) but he didn’t know what the rest of the fishes’ words meant. If only Dr. Curwen would wake up! (If he can wake up, Timmy’s mind warned him, but he was too scared to actually try to shake the doctor awake.)

Then, in the midst of his fear, Timmy had a flash of inspiration, his third of the night, and a reason for pride in him. He remembered that whenever someone who hadn’t met the deaf kids in his special school class tried to talk to them, they’d point to their ears and shake their heads no, and do likewise after pointing to their mouths. Dr. Curwen said that the fish were very intelligent, that they were sensitive…they had eyes, could see, so maybe.…

Tapping on the tank to get their attention, Timmy pointed to the screen, then to his eyes, and shook his head quickly, the way he did when Daddy gave him his first electric shaver haircut in the kitchen. Daddy hadn’t paid any attention to him then, but the fish immediately seemed to notice his actions, and after looking at each other, color sneezing, they propelled themselves over to the sensors once again. Timmy stopped shaking his head, sighed, and thought, And the doc said they were smart. They’d paid attention to him all right, but didn’t understand. Slowly shaking his head in disgust, Timmy walked over to his wheeled bucket and mob, and began to gather up his belongings. Under his feet, the floor shook a little, and he wondered if something had gone ka-boom on one of the lower floors. Either that or a big truck must have gone by outside, shaking the ground. Sometimes, at home, the ground would shake a little, making the dishes rattle and dance on the shelves and when Timmy would get scared, Daddy would say, “Big truck went by, Timmy…just a real big truck. Lots of big trucks in California.” This time, nothing tipped over, so Timmy immediately forgot about the shaking floor. Looking back at the display screen, he saw the message the fish had left for him:

WE [LOVE] YOU [TIMMY]

Timmy understood his name, and decided that since he was getting ready to leave the office, the fish had to be saying goodbye to him. He decided to pretend that he was as smart as the doctor (it can’t hurt) and went over and tapped on the tank until all his funny-looking small friends were staring at him with their saucer-like eyes. He solemnly waved bye-bye to each fish in turn, and behind him the screen lit up with these words, as the cuttlefish broke away in turn and faced the sensors:

WE [ARE] [SORRY] YOU [DO NOT] [UNDERSTAND] YOU [COULD] HAVE [ESCAPED] [PERHAPS] WE WILL [MISS] YOU [AFTER] THE NOT GOOD LARGE LAND [CRACK] [COMES] [AT] [LEAST] YOU [NOT] SCARED [LIKE] [DR CURWEN] WE WILL [MISS] YOU [TIMMY]

unseen and unreadable by Timmy, yet…not totally lost or meaningless. A couple of fish came close to their side of the glass, and brushed their waving supple arms against the glass. Glad that Dr. Curwen was asleep (please just be sleeping doc, I like you) and not able to see him looking silly, Timmy bent down and kissed the cool glass of the tank, and the six fishes in turn came close to the glass behind his puckered lips (up close Timmy found them pretty and horrible all at once) in an imitation of his gesture, so maybe they weren’t so dumb after all—

And then, Timmy remembered something from special school, how the blind girl used to say, “Can I read your face?” and she’d reach out and touch your face so she could “see” it with her fingertips.… Timmy was good at feeling nameplates to read them, so maybe—

Maybe he could be as smart as Dr. Curwen…he could read too, in a special way. Pulling over the plastic and rubber round footstool Dr. Curwen used. Timmy stepped up close to the tank, and after pushing up his sleeve, put his hand and arm into the cool rippling water, seeing the oil residue of fishie food cling to his bare arm at the water line. His hand and arm looked all funny—wavery and sort of blue—when he looked at it through the glass, and all the cuttlefish jetted over to inspect his waving arms. He tried to pet them, to “read” them like the blind girl used to do, but they eluded his grasp, and the more he wiggled his fingers and tried to grab them, cooler his hand got.

And it began to look…different. Pruney, like when he sat in the bathtub too long, but also longer, and paler blue. And Timmy looked at his fingers through the glass, remembering what Daddy said about when Aunt Millie died, when Daddy was talking to their neighbor Mrs. Coffey when he didn’t think Timmy could hear, “The nurse said her lips went blue, her nails too…at that point there wasn’t much to do, since she specified no help and…” and Timmy kept wiggling his odd blue fingers, until he thought, Blue fingers…and Aunt Millie died and they put her in a box and then we had the visitation.

One of the cuttlefish pulsed over by his hand, and with the most gentle of motions, wrapped a tendril-like arm around his elongated and blue-pulsing finger, and his finger and the arm of the cuttlefish both changed—together. And as the earth shook under the tank, the cuttlefish and Timmy looked at each other, and all Timmy could see in his mind was Aunt Millie, dead in the box…and he understood for the first time that evening. Lips close to the tank, Timmy whispered, “I’m going to die…and you knew it, didn’t you guys?”

And the cuttlefish, who had been spending two years watching Dr. Curwen—his efforts at communication on the sensor board, as well as the bits of communicating he did without thinking, the nod of his head, or the smile on his face before he typed in a message of praise—slowly moved in the water without shifting color or shape, a simple motion, actually, but to Timmy it was a miracle. The fish had said something to him! No funny green letters and hooked thingies on a screen, just a nod of its body—meant just for him. Timmy’s Daddy had told Timmy at the funeral, “We all have to die, Timmy.… It’s sad Aunt Millie is gone, but she’s not hurting where she is. Remember that, okay, son?”

Timmy had remembered, and as the floor shook so much it made the little pills on Dr. Curwen’s counter shake and roll, he very carefully took one of the cuttlefish’s arms between his thumb and forefinger and shook it, then pulled his hand out of the tank and dried it on his big pink rag hung on the side of his mop stand. As it dried the pink color gradually returned, and the fingers grew short and blunt again…but Timmy didn’t forget what he’d seen. The fish said he’d die, but Daddy said it meant not hurting anymore. No more people making fun of him, making him hurt inside. Something to look forward to, not fear.

Then, afraid because he’d already spent too much time lingering here, Timmy waved a single goodbye to the tank of fishes, and leaving the light on the way the doctor left it, he quitted the room and carefully locked the door behind him.

On the way to Dr. Jones’s (one hand) lab, he felt the floor move again under his feet, enough to slosh some of the water from his bucket onto the sand-colored carpeting and Timmy hoped that one of the big sand-filled ash trays wouldn’t tip over. The time he’d spent lingering in Dr. Curwen’s office slipped from his mind.

He didn’t think that he had the time to clean up after the ash trays tonight, too.