In the scintillating mystique of the coming night, the two squid people saunter through the city park. Amid their hundreds of writhing tentacles, two intertwine. Suction cups to suction cups. At this meeting point between them, their five chambered hearts bleed into the same throbbing pulse.
They find a lovely bench beneath a lamppost where they sit and squish their bodies together, side by side. Through the little wriggles of their hundreds of tentacles, they whisper touching secrets.
“I want to be connected to you like this forever,” says the one. “Forever, forever.”
“You know we can’t,” says the other. “You know, you know.” It says this because they both have an even number of tentacles. In the city of squid people, citizens live by the law that odds go with evens and evens with odds. It’s only natural. Good, common sense.
And so they sit on the bench in the secret of the night as their scandalous tentacles writhe and twist in the breeze. Intertwining. Mingling. Feeling. Sinning. They press their squishy bodies together until it feels like they’ll pop. Until their hundreds of tentacles ache with fatigue and the dawn breaks. And the city wakes. And the world moves forward. And they are torn apart. Tentacle from longing tentacle, feeling through the empty air, desperate and incomplete.
Gale Haut has a forthcoming poem in Bull Spec magazine, which is a really nice publication started by Sam Montgomery. Gale has also completed an interstitial novel for teens, which puts Gale in the market for an agent.
