The Octopus Tank
by Mari Harrison
The aquarium keeps its lone octopus in the corner tank, away from children who bang on glass. I visit every Thursday when admission is free and it’s mostly empty. The octopus is small with eyes that track movement like it’s solving problems I can’t see. Today, it’s pressed against the back wall, arms splayed in eight directions, suckers flat against the glass. The placard says they’re solitary creatures, highly intelligent, capable of learning through observation. I wonder what it’s learned from watching us watch it.
My therapist says I’m avoidant. That I withdraw when I should engage, flatten myself against walls instead of reaching out. She doesn’t understand. I’ve spent fifteen years in the same cubicle doing work that doesn’t matter. Every Sunday night my chest tightens thinking about Monday morning. There’s an application half-finished on my laptop for an MFA program, but I can’t make myself click submit. Sometimes, being small and still feels like the only intelligent choice.
The octopus pulls one arm free and drags it across the sand. Then another. It moves like it’s testing each limb separately, deciding whether they all still belong to the same body.
There’s a volunteer talking to a school group by the jellyfish. She’s explaining how octopuses squeeze through any opening larger than their beak, how they’ve been known to escape tanks and travel across floors to reach others. How they die young, most only living a year or two. I wonder how much of its short life this octopus has spent hoping the glass might give.
The octopus changes color. Rust to brown to pale grey. The placard says this is either camouflage, communication, or emotion. Scientists aren’t sure which. Maybe all three at once.
I press my palm to the glass. The octopus doesn’t move toward it or away. It watches me with both eyes at angles I didn’t know eyes could manage. For a moment we’re both pressed against our respective surfaces, both of us solving problems the other can’t see.
The volunteer herds children toward the shark tunnel. I stay. The octopus slowly contracts, pulling its arms inward until it’s compact, hidden in coral. I don’t know if it’s hiding or trying to tell me something. I don’t know what I’m doing either, standing here alone on a Thursday, palm still warm from where it touched the glass.
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BIO
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Mari Harrison has been a waitress, telemarketer, college biology teacher, neuroscience PhD candidate, an editor, and a technical writer. She also admits she may have ADHD. Eventually, she quit writing for the government to write her own stories and, coincidently, started sleeping better. She’s cheered on by her husband and adult children, supervised by a geriatric Great Dane, and routinely sabotaged by Beta the cat. Her fiction and poetry appear in Apex Magazine, Clamor, manywor(l)ds, and on the 4LPH4NUMER1C podcast (forthcoming).
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WHY I WRITE
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I spent years studying the brain, then decades writing facts that demanded certainty and the illusion of control. After all that time shaping language to sound authoritative, I needed to remember that clarity is not understanding, contradiction can be luminous, and that the spaces between structure and surrender are where stories breathe.
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I write to follow the invisible currents beneath the obvious—to trace the intelligence in small movements, the logic that shifts when wonder enters, and the moments when uncertainty feels more truthful. It's how I practice attention to what's actually alive, not what should be there, but what is.
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When the world pushes for order and certainty, writing is how I test whether anything still breathes underneath, whether the quiet pulse of imagination and empathy survives. It's how I give form to the stubborn beauty in ordinary things, the questions that have no answers, and the messy joy of worlds that refuse to fit the templates I once lived inside.
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I write to linger with what fascinates me, to let it remain without needing to tidy it up. I write to let myself breathe.
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​SOCIAL MEDIA
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Bluesky: @javajnkie
Twitter (X): @javajnkie