The Squids Vero

“Slay.”

The shutter sound whirs loudly in the bathroom. In the farthest stall of three, Vero clicks a sharp nail into the groove on the side of her phone and turns off her ringer while she checks the image. She crops out the toilet paper dispenser and brightens the contrast to make her eyes pop. Extending her arm for another one, nose just off-left of the center axis, a heavy-lidded smize pulses above her cheeks.

“Slay.” 

Her jaw lists to a pause at the end of the word. She pulls the phone to her chest, zooming in on the part of the photo where, in the center of her bottom row of teeth, two little crooked sisters lean against each other. A couple of taps in the editor straightens them. Another three taps and her skin is lighter, her cheeks hollowed. She sniffs her armpit and makes a face, pulling toilet paper from the roll and pressing the wad in places where the sweat has begun to creep. She tosses the wet rag into the bowl and frames up for another one.  

“Slay.”

As she checks it, a message comes in from Lil. “That kid who sits behind us in sociology was playing with his peepee during class soooooooo crazy!!!!” Vero, eyes dark, replies “lol wut was it good???lol” and returns to the shot she just took. The image stutters, blurs, the screen going an electric blue before whipping back to the photo. Vero closes and reopens her Photos. “Fuuuuuuck,” she breathes. All good. There she is. Lil responds with a puke emoji and: “crazy”. Vero dismisses the text and examines her latest. This shot feels distracted, like she’s looking at someone out of frame, but that also makes it kind of arty, right? She might try pulling her shirt a little lower in the next one but doesn’t want to hear it from her sister so she also might not. She can feel her hair going lank so she tousles it with her right hand and leans against the stall wall, holding the phone at arms-length, trying to find some good light and having no luck.

She snaps one anyway, “Slay”, and appraises it. Not bad, too much shadow. She wonders if she should take Paolo up on his “photo shoot” idea. He got a Canon for his birthday and it’s been sitting on his desk since then, like a poisonous tortoise, its one wide eye capped black. She told him she’d think about it, smiling from under her eyebrows at him while she said it, and he’d laughed. “They’d be completely tasteful,” squeezing her mid-thigh, and she’d hit him softly on the knee, whisper-laughing, “You’re a gross boy.” She went down on him that night while Law and Order: SVU played in the background. He brought Gatorade in from the kitchen after they’d cleaned up. His mom always bought the orange kind and Vero appreciated it.                 

She scrolls through her photos, white-tipped nail ticking the screen with each swipe. She sails through the ones from today (mostly her from the ribcage up, Miley-mouthed) and finds the pictures from the Arboretum.  

She had looked cute that day. Paolo had, too. He’d suggested they go, which was nice because he never suggested they do anything except fuck around in his car outside his parents’ place. He’d asked her, “You like plants? Like, generally?” “Sure,” she shrugged. “I like plants okay.” “Cool,” and then he’d texted her a ticket for the next afternoon. She decided to wear her red crop top with the cleavage and the black pants she’d worn the night they first made out. He wore a white button-down that was too big in the neck but she liked the way it fell around his thin body, like he was already in bed, in sheets. They’d found the hothouse where the corpse plant was held but it wasn’t open to visitors so they’d sat on the black iron rail fence surrounding it, right under the sign that read “CORPSE PLANT”, and there, among the manicured ferns and palms, they’d kissed and taken a photo.  

She’s already brightened the brights and darkened the darks in this one but she zooms in on the place where their lips meet. She sits down on the lid of the toilet, zooming in and out on their faces, smooshing them together, when she notices a smear near her neck. She wipes her screen with her thumb. Still there. She zooms in close, so close the pixels stand out like honeycomb, then backs out to normal. It’s definitely inside the photo. Right side of her neck, about two inches below her ear, the size of a peach pit, and milky clear - a smear. She thinks ‘smear’ because this is the closest approximation of what she is seeing - like mascara flakes on her eyelid after crying - but the formation on her neck reminds her more of the time she dissected a squid in fifth grade.  

Her mom had gotten her a pair of really nice scissors, silver metal, and the sharp snip sound they made when they closed always made her shiver. On the day of the dissection, her teacher sat them all down at a long plastic table outside under a pop-up canopy. She saw her name written in block letters on a piece of masking tape fixed to the table. Below the tape, in a white shallow lucite box, was a dead squid. About twelve inches long, the wet, mud-colored cadaver’s noodly legs drooped into a tangled pile near the bottom of the box. She breathed into the box, getting a fishy smell in return that felt like she had a penny caught in her throat.  

“All right!” shrieked Ms. Hunter. “Everyone should be sitting in front of your study tray! Now, we’re going to identify all the different parts of our squid.” As she said this, she held up a particleboard display of a cartoon squid, red arrows jabbing identifiers into its body. FIN. MANTLE. OLFACTORY CREST. SIPHON. EYE. Ms. Hunter talked about the terrible difference between an arm and a tentacle, and the elongated construction of organs tubed together inside this conscious sleeve. The goal for today, she said, would be to locate the squid’s ink sac and use the liquid to write your name. Extra credit was available to those who used the gladius (the squid’s internal shell) as their pen. As Vero picked up her scissors, she realized that she was shaking and sweating. I’m going to rip this thing up and play with its insides, she thought, and grinned ghoulishly, pushing the image through her teeth like logs through a woodchipper. She snipped open her scissors, shivered, and traced a line from the tip of the squid’s head, lingered near the eye, and slid all the way down the longest tentacle. She decided she’d try slipping one blade into the squid’s siphon, try opening it up from the side to reveal the entirety of its cavity in order to locate the ink sac more easily. As the sharp tip entered the teardrop-sized hole in the squid’s body, she could feel the mushy flesh glide onto the blade and part, so easily torn she thought something had gone wrong. From between the lips of the fresh cut, a smooth yellow-white substance began to weep. It oozed quickly and silently down the lucite surface, pooling in a corner, catching stray beams of reflected sunlight and prisming them, projecting colors onto the cold skin of the dead cephalopod. Vero stared at the liquid.  

“Ms. Hunter!” she yelled, raising her hand.  

“Vero! Yes?”

“My squid is…sick.”

Ms. Hunter took a slow concerned walk over to where Vero was still staring into the not-quite-clear squid puddle.  

“Ooooohh,” Ms. Hunter said, squinting into the dish. “Looks like it went bad, huh?”

Vero nodded, eyes swimming with unannounced, unexpected tears. Her vision blurred and she looked at her teacher. “Why is it like that?”  

“Like what?”

“Like…nothing. Like its blood is…empty?”

“Oh, Veronica,” Ms. Hunter smiled, impressed with her thoughtful student. “That is so - “ 

“Like it wasn’t ever alive.”

“Why is it…?” she whispers in the stall to herself, still zoomed in and staring at the squidblood-colored blob nestled between her ear and neck. She would have noticed it there before now. She’s stared at this photo of herself and Paolo kissing by the corpse plant so many times since that day. Wondering if her phone or the camera is broken, she opens her Settings and is starting to try to figure out where to begin her search for some reason for this glitch when she feels wind on her neck and a second-long throb under the right side of her jaw.  

Vero’s hand seems to be floating, making no hurry to reach the spot where the throb has rapidly matured into a pain. Her fingertips touch the flesh of her neck near her earlobe and begin to make their way down. When they reach the spot, she stops moving. She stops breathing. The breeze is strong now, coursing over the light invisible hair of her knuckles, and it is coming from inside. Inside of her.  

She drops her phone and it hits the tile in clatters, probably shattered. Her knees slip forward uselessly and she bashes her head against the door before sidling to the floor, the tips of her index and middle fingers on her right hand resting just inside the hole in her neck. The air rushes under those fingernails in cuts, their white tips glaring in the darkened bathroom stall. But where is that light coming from, oh god, what is that light.  

Her eyes move to her right wrist where a whitish-yellow light is contained within the wobbly circumference of a ragged porthole-shaped shadow. In that shadow, she can see the bump of her two fingers gripping the lip of her new abyss. She can also see the shadow of a squid, its arms and tentacles raised in greeting, growing larger as it floats ever closer to its first taste of real living.