The Pocket Kraken
Krakenulus minor
Natural history
The Pocket Kraken is anatomically identical to the abyssal kraken of legend in every respect but scale, a fact the Pocket Kraken has either not been told or has declined to accept. Adults reach four centimeters across the mantle. They are found wherever there is standing water and an audience — puddles, birdbaths, the water glass on a nightstand — and they claim each in turn as their domain, announcing the claim with a cry that has been described as ‘the sound of a kettle having an opinion.’
Its predations are conducted with total seriousness. A Pocket Kraken will stalk a paper boat for an hour, tentacles rippling with ancient patience, before erupting from the depths of the puddle to drag it under in a maelstrom fully six inches across. Eyewitnesses report that the boat goes down slowly, and that the kraken watches it go down, and that something in the tableau makes it impossible to laugh, though it is never quite possible to say what.
Attempts to relocate Pocket Krakens to the open ocean have failed uniformly. Released specimens return inland within the week, dripping and furious. The ocean, one researcher noted, is already claimed — by whom, the krakens do not say — and besides, it is hard to be a legend in water that big. In a rain barrel, a monster can matter.
A fable
A Pocket Kraken lived in a rain barrel behind a bakery, and it was the terror of that barrel. Leaves feared it. A toy soldier stood at the bottom among the wrecks of four paper boats, a monument to its wrath. In the evenings the kraken would rise to the surface and survey its dominion, all forty inches of it, and find it good.
A gull landed on the barrel’s rim. Gulls have seen everything and respect none of it. “I’ve been to the sea,” said the gull. “I’ve seen your cousins. They pull down ships with a hundred men aboard. What have you ever sunk?”
“Everything,” said the kraken, “that has ever sailed my sea.”
The gull laughed and flew off to insult someone else. And that night it began to rain, and the barrel filled and filled, and overflowed down the alley in a silver thread, and the kraken rode the flood into a drain and out a culvert and down a creek, and was carried at last, protesting, into the actual sea — which was black, and cold, and did not know it was there. It swam in that immensity for one night. It sank nothing. It mattered to no one. The wrecks were nobody’s monument.
It was back in the barrel by Thursday. The toy soldier still stood where it had drowned. “You could have stayed,” said a snail on the barrel wall. “You could have been small in the great sea instead of great in the small one.” The kraken settled into the deep, which was two feet down, and wrapped a tentacle around the mast of a new paper boat, unhurried, the way its cousins do. “I could,” it said, “but this way, the boats are all mine.”
An ocean will make you honest about your size; choose your waters accordingly.
The moral of it