We pass my favourite octopus, Paul and I, on the way to my office at the Aquarium. Paul doesn’t kiss me. I want to pause, watch the octopus parkour across its tank – shrinking into the smallest corner, then exploding across the glass in a tangle of limbs – but something marble in Paul stops me.
In their tank, the deadly box jellyfish are in their fertile medusa phase. They float, amniotic. When Paul says ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore, I’m sorry,’ I don’t understand him. ‘The jellyfish?’ I ask, watching the translucent veils of protein pulse through the water. And then I understand, that with these few words he is ending our decade together, my thirties.
I press my palm hard against the glass of the tank and it goes all the way through until it too is palely-pink and lucent. My body shimmers with anger. I can’t feel the water, and, cupping one of the jellyfish in my hand, I feel no pain either. My staff look the other way. Paul watches - confused as I pull the jellyfish from the tank, nervous as I pull the long and trailing tendrils from the water, as they become one with my curling hair, until I am a gorgon with flailing tentacles of venom.
He says ‘I can explain,’ but before the words are finished, he makes the mistake of looking me in the eye and starts to petrify, feet solidified to the ground, legs held in place, arms out, mouth frozen in a stony scream. No-one takes any notice.
I leave him there – visitors to the Aquarium flowing around his statue like water – and I pulse towards the exit, my own medusa phase almost at an empty end.
Fiona McKay is the author of the Novella-in-Flash The Top Road, AdHoc Fiction (2023), the Flash Fiction collection Drawn and Quartered, Alien Buddha Press (2023), and The Lives of the Dead, a Novella-in-Flash, is forthcoming from AdHoc Fiction (2025). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her Flash Fiction is in Bath Flash, Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Variant Lit, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Bending Genres, Fractured Lit, Peatsmoke and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
She is on X (formerly Twitter) @fionaemckayryan and Bluesky @fionamckay.bsky.social.
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