Holothurian ~ fiction by Addison Zeller

At the cove, my father explained holothurians to me: the sea cucumber.

He had been quiet all day, but he was excited now that he had seen one on a rock just under the surface. We looked down into the clear water at the holothurian. It had dots on its cylindrical body like eyes on a moth’s wing. I did not want it to be alive.

“The hole there is an anus. This animal is essentially a living colon. Life in its simplest form. Basically just a digestive tract.”

A small face peered out of the holothurian’s anus.

“Pearlfish like to hide in it.”

When I leaned over to see the pearl fish clearly, I put my foot close to the holothurian.

“Better not,” he said. “Stressed or threatened, it self-eviscerates.”

But white thin tubes were already sliding out of the anus like spaghetti from a pasta maker. The startled fish shot past my ankles.

“Of course,” he said, wearily.

The holothurian deflated into a small, leathery brown pouch.

“Dead?” I asked.

“No, no. Just very tired.”

So was he. I could hear it in him. The day was over now. He took us back home and sat quietly until it was time to go to bed. When I got up in the night, he was still sitting there.

My father was interested in everything. He had an encyclopedia in which good and bad angels were listed and described. There were six hundred entries. I believe I read an entry for an angel—good or bad I don’t remember—that was known to self-eviscerate from a hole in its head: a mouth or an anus.

Another angel was made entirely of eyes.

Some were wings, some were cylinders.

“You understand I can’t take it anymore? That it’s too much?” he would ask.

I would shake my head, or pretend I didn’t. But he made it impossible to say nothing. Once, I nodded yes, it was too much.

That was all he needed: a person to say so. He began to deflate.

I can’t find the entry about the angel. I once saw a holothurian dried in a jar.

 

Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in 3:AM, Epiphany, Cincinnati Review, and many other publications.