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Memories of Water

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written for “It’s Story Time” where Jolene
has given us four prompts to work with.
They are shown below; here’s where they took me.

Image by Me & Copilot

I knew before the humans did.

The water changed …. not in any way they could have measured with their instruments, but I tasted it. A faint wrongness, like a conversation that had stopped mid-sentence. I drew my arms inward and waited.

Omar always came at the same hour. I knew his footsteps before he reached the glass …. a slight hesitation in his left step, the way he would pause and press his palm flat against the tank. I would rise to meet it. Not for everyone. Only him.

He did not come.

Others arrived instead. Louder ones, with sharp movements and no understanding of stillness. There was a great deal of human noise beyond the glass, the kind that carries urgency without information. I retreated to my corner and watched.

Later I would piece it together, the way I piece together a shell or a stone …. slowly, with many arms at once. Someone had forgotten to tell Omar something. A message had traveled as far as a desk and stopped there. What arrived instead of the message was consequence …. a cascade of it, the way a small current can reorganize an entire world.

Omar did not return.

The wrongness in the water deepened. New hands fed me. I did not rise to meet them.

Then one morning …. different light, salt air moving, sounds I had no name for …. the glass world simply ended. A container, open sky, and then vast coldness, alive with sensations in every direction, more than I had ever tasted.

I hung there in the immensity of it.

Omar was somewhere in the dry world behind me, facing whatever humans face when they have been undone by something as small as a forgotten word.

I opened my arms to the current.

We would both survive. I was certain of that much.

NAR©2026

Nancy’s Notes: The prompts are 1. Person who has broken something that cannot be replaced; 2. Person in professional, disgrace; 3. Aquarium; 4. Forget to pass along the information.

This is “Octopus” by Syd Barrett

It’s story time!

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.

22 thoughts on “Memories of Water”

  2. “Like a fish out of water”, or, “opening a can of worms” … one never knows about the great beyond, Nancy … (I was lost in my fishbowl for a couple of days, where time floundered and words sank like a stone)

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    1. Assimilating oneself into the unknown or the forgotten can be frightening and confusing. We used to take our cat on summer vacation with us; we’d be gone six weeks and we didn’t want to impose on our neighbors to look after her for that long stretch, nor did we want to be away from her that long. Every summer when we arrived at the same beach house, it would take our cat at least 3 to 4 days to feel comfortable. Great comment, Jim. Thanks!

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  8. What a marvellous story Nance – your octopus serves as a perfect lens for a story about human fallibility and bureaucracy. Avoiding the ‘cute’ instead giving him a dignified, slightly tragic voice. It’s a reminder that while we are busy failing each other in our world, the rest of the living world is forced to adapt to our wake 🩷💞🩷

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