The Recollection of Oliver the Octopus

“If octopus… like me… live for only three years… then I believe it's about time for me to go. A hundred years is more than enough, I say. I just hope that history will remember me…… maybe not. I didn’t do anything heroic”. And he passed away, alone in the darkness.

100 years before

The humans had called him Oliver, Oliver the octopus. Perhaps they called him Oliver because “octopus” started with an O, or maybe because his black suckers looked like a sliced olive fruit, or maybe he was named after a character called “Oliver Twist” because he got into a lot of trouble.

“Found him”! A human called as she spotted him sitting on a bucket.

“He got this far”? Another one asked and rushed into the room as well.

Oliver clung fast to the bucket as a human reached for him. They grabbed him, but his squishy head slipped right out of their hands. With some of his tentacles, he twirled them over his body, and secreted a slime he coated himself in.

“He’s stuck to the feeding bucket. He won’t come off”, the human complained and attempted to grab under him. Unless they wanted to hurt him, they wouldn’t be able to get him off. He was an octopus on a mission, to stay out of his stupid lonely tank as long as he could, also to cause trouble.

“Oliver, can you PLEASE get off the bucket. We need this to feed the fish”, the nicer human attempted to argue with him. A creature that didn’t understand human would ignore her, as Oliver did.

“What are we going to do? Can we use another bucket and dunk this one into his tank”? The other human asked.

“No, that one is cracked, we would get dead fish water EVERYWHERE”, the nice human sighed, “Oliver, please, please get off”.

Oliver swirled his tentacles over his head and shot a small spurt of water at them.

“Forget it”, the nice one gave in, “I’m just going to feed the fish”.

He picked up the bucket, Oliver still attached and walked with it through the building.

In the halls, the tanks cast bright blue all over the walls and shadows of sunlight swirled along their faces. Massive shapes, fish of all sizes and colors filled these massive windows of blue. Eyes followed the human as he moved and with flicks of their tails the fish could speed along with him. Some tanks were smaller and in the bucket were flakes and worms for them. Those tanks held small fish, strange sea horses covered with long kelplike tendrils, noodles that stuck their heads in the air as the food fell, crabs. Oliver wanted to eat those crabs.

The human tossed little fish into a pool of water filled with stingrays that flowed over the bottom with ease. There were many of them, Oliver saw and they took the dried sardines. The next tank were the jellyfish, all in massive, endless looking tanks with dark waters. The jellyfish glowed in the dark and ate the same sardines as the stingrays. The otters, furry fish with strange fins and sharp little teeth ate the sardines, or more like flung them around. The penguins dove for the sardines from the rocks Oliver’s human stood atop of. The noise was immeasurable.

For the big tanks Oliver had to quickly switch over to another bucket, this one bigger and full of larger and wetter fish. This had caused a ruckus among the humans who again attempted to try the same tactics as before. Oliver did not budge.

The tanks had massive expanses of water and despite having no sun, were bright and trickled waves of light from under the water. Giants reached up to the surface, massive flat fish with black backs and wide mouths graced the surface and took from a long pole held out to them. A large silver shape swirled nearby, it took the food in its mouth full of hundreds of teeth and glided away on its many sharp fins. The humans also fed a larger, spotted version of that creature in a separate tank. It was slow and peaceful with white spots that spangled down its back like it had been rained on by the jellyfish.

“Ok Oliver. We are done. Into your tank, come on”, the human demanded and shook Oliver over his tank.

He let go.

He fell into the water and sunk to the bottom. A crab waited for him, hid in his rocks and caves for him, just like they had when he wasn’t naughty.

“FINALLY. Never again”, the human said tiredly and had wandered off to put the bucket away.

Oh Oliver did it again, and again and again every day for many years. The humans had stopped fighting him, he was accepted as part of the staff. He watched as everyday the humans fed the many beings in their sanctuaries of light and peace. Then there had been a day he had waited and waited and waited.

It was the day that no humans came, where the air was hot and smelly. The day Oliver picked up the buckets and fed the animals all by himself.

87 years before

It was several years later when the stingrays began their communication. It had been a simple thing. A young stingray, one born in the tank Oliver fed every day. It was the third generation in that tank under Oliver’s care. It was one day when Oliver had dumped the dried fish in, did she attempt to hop up onto the rock he sat on. She failed and slid back into the water. She had splashed him, though he didn’t mind. She tried again and gained no more height than before. Her body slid down the rock and back into the water.

Oliver had only blinked at her and attempted to hand her a fish. She took it and spat it out. She raised her tail out of the water and out slid a long, bone stinger. Oliver pulled his tentacles in toward himself. She stabbed down. Her tail glanced off the rock under him. She struck again and again and again. When she stopped, Oliver looked down. She stared up at him with her small golden eyes past algae that grew on her back. With her tail she pointed at the rock. He looked down.

Upon it was a shape scratched in the stone. It was round and had a small triangle at the end. It looked like a general idea of a fish. But Oliver already gave her fish and she didn’t want it. What else could she want?

She jabbed her spine in the air at a tank across the way from her. In it were the small purple and yellow fish, the ones that had overpopulated their tank. They gazed on, none the wiser that something wanted to eat them.

Oliver understood what she wanted. He flipped his tentacles at her in response and went to invade that tank. He pulled out a couple of fish and sent them in with her. Her and her siblings chased the fish through the pool, over the swirls of fibrous algae. Oliver left them to it.

The stingrays had not eaten the fish. Once caught they had decided that those fish tasted terrible. Instead they had kept the fish. The fish ate the algae in their tank and the stingrays kept them out of reach of seagulls in the building.

The little fish drawing had been the start of the stingrays using their tails to communicate. At first it was the simple drawings, then it was simplified versions of the simple drawings. Then there had been the tapping of their tails on the ground. The young stingray became famous amongst the taps and scratches. When she passed on four years later, her purple fish with her, the stingrays had engraved her story into their walls forever. Oliver could read about her every time he fed the stingrays.

45 years ago

“It’s a simple deal, can’t we let bygones be bygones” and otter squeaked in its own language at a penguin who glared daggers at him. The penguin beside him honked and slapped something out to the leader penguin.

“He says”, the penguin said in a penguin accented squeak, “That this hall is neutral territory, it lies beyond the glass so it belongs to no one so it is reasonable to claim that you can’t have nests in it”.

“It is a neutral zone, I agree”, the otter’s whiskers fell, “But that should mean the hall should be used for anyone who needs it. And we need it. More pups are being born every year and it is getting far too crowded”.

“We cannot have you filling every nook and cranny with your offspring”, the leader penguin honked, “If you are having trouble, have less offspring, or kill off the ones you have now. We are sure the sharks would love the extra food”.

The otter went down on all fours and raised his tail. The others did the same. A united insult against the penguins who glared and raised their beaks into the sky, endless insults from both sides. The penguin and otter tanks, connected by the room above where both could be fed at the same time. They had ventured out of their enclosures over time and joined Oliver in the room. Squabbles happened very often. Oliver sat and watched them, bucket in tentacle.

“I can’t believe you would say that”, the otter leader shrieked and bared his teeth.

“I don’t know what you mean, us penguins kill our offspring all the time. It is no big deal”, the Penguin leader clacked his beak.

The otters looked infuriated. Mother otters tucked their fluffy children closer to their bodies. The penguins glared at their hostility, they hissed and flapped their flippers in annoyance.

Oliver held up his food buckets.

“Oh good, food is here”, The two groups said. They ate their fill and Oliver didn’t hear any more of it. The next time he went in there, the otters and the penguins dared not to talk to each other for days.

Then the mother otters had tapped on his door.

“Please, oh good octopus, please protect our children”, they begged to his tank.

“From… what”? He had squeaked at them in their language. He had been there since the language first developed, he knew it all.

“The penguins. We moved into the neutral zone. They are after our children. Please keep them safe”.

The otter mothers never returned. Oliver had a room full of baby otters who never saw their mothers again.

The penguins came in next.

“Please, oh kind octopus”, they pleaded, “The otters have retaliated by killing our chicks, please keep our chicks safe”.

The penguin mothers never came back.

A war had taken them.

The young otters and the young penguins however, got along very well. No one knew they were there, no mother would dare put their young in danger. No one taught them why their parents fought. One penguin grew up brave and leaderlike. When he shed his fluffy feathers and joined the world of the outside with his otter and penguin siblings, he sought to end the war. Under his command, the war soon ended and the two groups had peace. They developed a writing system, one that could be translated to honks and squeaks all the same. His story spread through the writing. The sharks knew of him, the stingrays knew of him, the eels knew of him. Oliver had admired that.

10 years ago

Before the food ran out, the Otters and the Penguins had moved on to farming kelp. It had been impressive, how they put together a place in their tanks for the kelp to grow. They traded the kelp with the sharks who traded them fish in their tanks, fish they had not eaten thanks to Oliver. The stingrays then traded mussels that grew in their pool for fish as well, but also transportation from the penguins. A ninety of feeding the life in that aquarium and Oliver wasn’t needed any more.

The last ten years of his life he fed the whale shark. She had lived one lifetime, she gave way to no new generations. She didn’t farm, she didn’t develop language, like him she stayed the same. The day she passed away, it wasn’t written in the books stingrays and otters wrote.

Oliver found that something to think about. He didn’t think much. He wondered. No one payed him any mind, no one thought of him as a hero, or thought him handsome or brave. He didn’t end the war between penguins and otters, he didn’t forge a way to communicate with other creatures. He didn’t have much of a life to write about. He saw a hundred heroes be born, a hundred hero’s thrive and a hundred heroes die. The little stingray had invented language, the penguin brought peace to a warring tribes, the shark had spread the idea of breeding fish for trade. Oliver didn’t do any of that.

And so when he passed he spoke, for the first time, in the language of the humans.

“If octopus… like me… live for only three years… then I believe it's about time for me to go. A hundred years is more than enough, I say. I just hope that history will remember me…… maybe not. I didn’t do anything heroic”.

When he passed on there was no great funeral, no one wrote about him, and in a few generations everyone forgot there had been an octopus named Oliver.

But Oliver was never forgotten. He was a secret hidden in a little tank in a dark, lonely room. One day the life in the aquarium would look for more life and find that all other aquariums had no life to speak of. Why was theirs different, they would ask one day. Them being alive was proof of Oliver.