“In our part of the country, we keep to ourselves,” the woman with the dark eyes behind the counter of the fishmonger’s shop advised Agirita.

Agirita was mesmerised.  “Your eyes…”

The woman moved both hands up to her face and removed the large octopus orbs from her empty eye sockets.

“With these, I can see.  But I must replace them every day.”

An ancient magic, Agirita thought.

“I have in my possession the eyes of a giant squid.  But they are large, like your head, too big for your…”

The woman shook her head.  “No eyes are too large for my vision.  Show them to me.”

Agirita nodded toward the old man.  Hunched over a wooden crate, he lifted himself onto his leathery legs and shuffled over to his cart, the donkey looking at him like the old man was wasting his time in this part of time.

He reached into the cart to pull the squid’s head closer, hoping to carve the eyes out with his machete.

When he grasped the squid, he felt muscle tension against his hands, as if the squid was still alive.

He looked back at Agirita.  She motioned impatiently.

He turned his head toward the squid and noticed its colouration was changing, as if the squid was trying to blend in with the old man’s cart.

He shook his head and stepped back, cautiously backing up to Agirita.  “We have made enough money selling the fish to the restaurants.  I am finished here.  You may take the squid off my cart now.”

She shrugged her shoulders and apologized to the fishmonger’s seller.

Agirita did not notice the change in the squid’s appearance but she was amazed that it did not smell badly, sitting as it was in the hot sun on the back of a donkey cart after more than two days on the deck of the ship.  But these were momentary thoughts that came and went like her apprehension when the men on the ship disappeared overnight, not a splash or shout to be heard, giving her a brief fright but then realising the profit of the ship’s haul was hers if she could operate the bridge herself, steering the boat toward an abandoned harbour she knew from her youth, far from town.

“Okay, old man, but this squid is mine if I remove it from your cart.”

“I am more than happy to let you claim the squid for you and you alone.  But I must take my donkey and my cart back with me.”

Agirita slipped an arm under the squid, where its tentacles met its head, and lifted.  At the back of her thoughts she felt as if the squid assisted her and climbed out of the cart on its own.  She simply thought, if she had to speak aloud, that the squid had lost a lot of water weight and was much easier to lift out than when she and the old man dragged the squid off the ship and onto his cart.

“Adios, amiga!”  The man climbed onto the cart, grabbed the reins and made a tch-tch sound.  The donkey slowly walked forward, taking the old man as far from the giant squid as he hoped he could possibly get.  He sent a silent prayer to God to protect the woman, the fishmonger and everyone in that part of town.

Agirita pulled the squid toward the fishmonger sales counter.  “This is the squid and you can see that it has very big eyes.”

The woman stepped from behind the counter and felt her way across the squid’s body, sensing a slight coolness to her touch, as if the squid was shying away from the sight her fingers provided her.

“I have never seen an animal such as this.  Very strong, yet very flexible.  Nothing like the little squid and octopi we get every day.”

“No, Señora.  In my many fishing excursions, no boats have caught such a creature.  I have yet to find a buyer because no one wants to eat plain squid flesh.  Besides, the suckers are too big.  The head and mantle are much too enormous to fit into a cooking pot.”

“Hmm…”  The woman felt the temperature of the body underneath her fingers pulsate.  She stepped back.  “How long has the squid been out of water?”

“It’s still fresh, if that’s what you mean.  It hasn’t started rotting at all, as a matter of fact.”

“I am not interested.  I will keep the eyes I have for today.”  She pulled the dark orbs out of her shirt pocket and returned to them to her eye sockets.  “Thank you for sharing your catch with me.  It is not mine to own.  Buenos dios!”

“May I use your bathroom before I go?”

“Of course.”  The woman returned to the counter and pointed behind her.  “That way.”

Agirita returned to find the woman missing from behind the counter.  She walked to the cafe next door but the woman was not inside.

Agirita shrugged off the woman’s disappearance, stooped, lifted the squid’s head and mantle onto her right shoulder, and walked toward the main shopping district in town.  She had no idea where she was going.

Neither did she know that the squid was walking on its tentacles behind her, having also changed its skin colour to that of a bright metallic red.

Passersby driving in a hurry thought they saw a woman pulling a strange mechanical device behind her, sort of like a tandem bicycle but something more, a tracked vehicle like a military tank, possibly.

Agirita did not care.  She felt a strange affinity for this creature captured in a random net haul in deep waters not far offshore.

In some ways, the creature was like her, an oddity, belonging to no one, wanted by no one, in strange, if not hostile, territory, dead but not dead, alive but not alive; although they both shared the same planet, they inhabited completely different worlds.

She remembered a big box store across town that often sold merchandise to discerning customers.  Maybe they would be interested in buying…if she felt like selling the giant squid by the time she got there.

After all, they had a history together by now, more than she’d shared with just about anyone, her close friends in name rather than in anything concrete she could name off the top of her head.

She stopped at a fountain in the center of a traffic circle, gently placing the squid’s upper body in the chlorinated water.  Noticing that the squid’s body was quickly getting dark in colour, she removed the squid and placed it on the steps leading up to the fountain.  The squid’s skin tone changed to that of the stone steps and she felt a sense of calm, as if the squid truly was still alive and giving her good vibes.

She heard a gurgling sound and looked behind her.  A goo had squirted out of the back of the squid, dropping what looked like pieces of the fishmonger seller’s clothes onto the lip of the fountain.

Agirita rubbed her eyes, feeling tired from the last couple of day, sure her imagination, heightened by sleep deprivation, was giving her hallucinations.

She looked back at the goo and it had slipped on over into the fountain, sinking onto the floor.

She took a deep breath and stooped down to pick up the squid again, catching her pants on the lip of a rock jutting out from the fountain, ripping large holes in both legs.  The bottom of the pants were literally hanging by threads so Agirita tore off the bottom of the jeans, earning her a wolf whistle from boys driving around the traffic circle in their Vespas.

She bowed to them and then gave them a not-so-friendly flip of her fingers.

She waited for a break in traffic flow and walked the squid over to a narrow alleyway where she could quietly carry the squid across much of the town unobserved.

A man, dressed in camouflage clothing from head to foot, stepped out in front of her several blocks later.

“Hey, sweetheart.  Where are you going with that contraption?  Isn’t it too big for a pretty  señorita like you?”

“It is certainly bigger than you will ever be, little man.  Think you can scare me with your pseudomilitary gear?  I have eaten and spat out more men like you than has served in our army.”

“Is that so?  Well, I have bedded uglier women than you out of pity.  But you…no way!  Charity has its limits!”

Agirita set the squid down and approached the man, noticing he was palming a switchblade.  “If you are so tough, why the knife?  Are you afraid of little girls in dark alleyways in the middle of the day?”

“This?  This is nothing.  I use it to frighten old ladies who are so attracted by my charms they become pests this time of day, swarming around me like bees to honey.”

“Well, tough guy, put away your toy and I’ll play with you.”

The man tossed the switchblade to the ground a few inches from one of the squid’s arms.  “You are like my sister, all talk and no action.”

Agirita began a spin to place a kick to the man’s groin but by the time she spun around, he was on his knees, his legs cut in half.

“Mother of God!  What was that?!”  His screams echoed down the alleyway, the houses around them empty except for a few old people taking afternoon siestas, their hearing aids neatly set on crocheted doilies next to their antique beds.

The bloody switchblade lay on street cobblestones next to one of the cutoff legs.

Agirita wondered what kind of insane man would slice off his own legs.

“Señorita!  Please, help me!  I am dying.”

Agirita turned to look back down the alleyway from where she had come, recalling a busy intersection not far away.  Surely…

A thump interrupted her thoughts.

She swung her head back around quickly and one of the man’s arms had dropped to the street next to his legs.

The man’s eyes were wide in panic, his head shaking, pointed straight at the squid.

Surely not…

“Please, please, please, Señorita!!!  Do not turn your back on me.  Your contraption is killing me, whatever it is.”

“The squid?”

“Yes, Señorita.  If that’s what you call it.”

“It’s dead.”

“Dead or alive, Señorita, I do not care.  Whatever you do, please, I confess my sins to you right here and now.  I am dying, thanks to that thing there.”

Agirita leaned forward and held the back of the man’s head because he was swaying.

“Thank you, Señorita.  Underneath this long-sleeved shirt is a tanktop that belonged to my father.  He died in the Great War of the Uprising and all I got was his tanktop and the switchblade.  Please take both of them from me now.  I am a bad man.  I know that now, and I don’t deserve them anymore.”

“No, I do not want your things.  You need them.”

The man’s eyelids fluttered and his skin paled while blood pulsed onto the cobblestones around Agirita’s boots.

“Señorita, you must obey the commands of a dying man.  It is a tradition in our country I need to hang on to.  Please take these things from me and do not tell people what a bad man I was today.  Tell them the shirt and the knife were given to you to honour a great father, Pedro Alejandro de la Joven Una.”

“Okay, I will do that.  But, may I ask, what is your name?”

“For you, and you alone, I give you my full name, chosen by my mother, pregnant with me when my father died, to honour my father’s favourite thing in the whole wide world.  My name, Señorita, is Doble Chocolate Cerveza Negra Fuerte, but my friends know me only as Fuerte.”

“An honourable name, Fuerte.”

“No, it is not.  My father was an alcoholic but when our country was at its lowest point and needed the most devoted soldiers, my father left our home in the middle of the night, not even bothering to kiss my mother goodbye, to serve his duty and earn the first steady paycheck of his life.”

“At least your father wasn’t killed by a stray bullet in a gunfight he was not involved in.”

“Señorita…cough, cough…I am feeling dizzy-headed.  I think I am seeing the light of the train coming down the tunnel to take me home.  Please pray for me, Señorita.  I am guilty of the highest crime our nation has devised.  I am dying, Señorita, and will do so as a virgin.”

Agirita almost lost her grip on Fuerte’s head.

“That’s right.  When I reached puberty at 12, I lied to my priest that I had enjoyed intercourse with a young woman, which he passed on to the government auditors and for which my mother was given a government subsidy in thanks for me replenishing the stock of our shrinking population.  The young woman became pregnant soon afterward and everyone assumed it was me.  I have carried this lie with me the rest of my life.”

“Fuerte, you will not get a full government burial.  They will burn your body if they find out…”

“Señorita, only you know this and why would they trust the word of a woman covered with the blood of a dead man and a switchblade on… the… ground… nearby?”

With a last, long effort to get the last word spoken, Fuerte’s body went limp.

Agirita slipped the one-armed shirt off of Fuerte, lifted the tanktop from his torso, removed her blood-stained shirt and replaced it with the tanktop.  She dropped the switchblade into her pocket after wiping the blood onto her discarded shirt before she dropped it into the pool coagulating below her.

“Hello?  Can anyone out there hear me?!”  Her shouts echoed briefly and the alleyway went silent.

She waited a couple of more minutes but nothing stirred except flies descending on Fuerte’s disembodied legs, arm and torso.

She slipped off her boots and pushed them past old food scraps into the bottom of a rubbish bin.

Taking another deep breath, Agirita hoisted the squid back onto her shoulders and hastily walked on down the alleyway, far from strange men who liked to cut off their limbs in unexplained rituals of self-pity.

She did not see the squid grab the body parts during the first unsteady steps she made as she got up to speed, leaving her shirt and Fuerte’s blood as evidence of an event no one noticed and thus, was never reported.

Like his father, Fuerte seemed to disappear without telling anyone goodbye.