The RedInkling Abroad

As I knelt in a nameless bay on the Pacific coast of northern Costa Rica, the skin on my forehead crisped and tightened. I squinted into the greenish shadow in the water in front of me.The rock above the shadow must have been gray once, like the stones on the beach, but the bay was home to algae and chitons and invertebrates and now that rock was a green-brown world.

I watched the shadow as a tube worm relaxed in my periphery; waving a few lacy tendrils in the water outside of his calcified home. I inched my right hand closer.

The birds were silent. The waves and the winds had stopped.

Whatever it was, it moved again. It shot straight through the shadow, against the tiny surface ripples. It was small and it was fast. I felt a deep flutter of excitement as I reached out to stop the creature’s flight around the rock, closing my hands around the most likely spot in the sandy tumble.

I stood up with my hands cupped and dripping. The water was clouded with sand and for a moment I wasn’t sure. Then there was a whisper of a tickle and a thrill went up my arm. The sand settled slowly, sugar coating my palm and the bean-sized lump in the center of it. There was a sparkling moment of absolute stillness.

And then, it moved.

Twisting as it rose, the miniature, perfectly formed octopus shrugged off the shimmering veil of sand. It hung motionless for an instant and then it was off, jetting around the teacup’s worth of water in the palm of my hand. It was the size of my pinky nail and a deep mottled red.

The Lilliputian cephalopod raced its own shadow back and forth. The hunched tentacles hugged tightly against its body and then quickly extended, driving the octopus forward and a tiny stream of water back, into the heel of my hand.

One tentacle drifted lazily beneath the creature to tickle a line slant-wise across my palm. I knelt next to the shadow of the rock and lowered my hand into the water, keeping my captive cupped inside.

The red octopus raised one tentacle above the others and stuck it firmly to the pad of my finger. He pulled himself up, tentacle over tentacle. He climbed as though he sensed the open ocean on the other side.

I lowered my fingers into the water and for a moment, he stuck. That instant glittered with sun and the bliss that comes from contact with the divine. Then the last sucker popped free and he was gone.