An octopus that writes existential treatises. Carlos del Puente Stories

 The octopus’s name was Cephalo, though no one ever used it. His family referred to him exclusively through a series of guttural clicks, which he transcribed in his journals as “the one who wastes ink on questions that dissolve in water.” Cephalo lived in a submerged Victorian parlor, its walls papered with kelp and its chandeliers strung with bioluminescent jellyfish that sighed in B-flat whenever someone mentioned mortality. His mother, a zealous collector of shipwrecked teacups, had arranged the room to mimic her childhood home in Prague, if Prague had been flooded, populated by eels, and governed by the strict laws of absurdity. She often floated near the ceiling, her tentacles knitting sweaters for lobsters no one had ever seen, while humming Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” backward.  Cephalo’s father, a rigid bureaucrat of the abyss, spent his days stamping permits for krill migrations and filing complaints against the tides. He despised his son’s treatise-writing, which he deemed “an unsanctioned use of cephalopod resources.” “Ink,” he’d lecture, jabbing a suckered arm at Cephalo’s latest manuscript, “is for contracts, threats, and escape—not this… this noodling about despair! Do you think the anglerfish worry about Heidegger? No! They glow and bite. Be practical!”  The twins, Cephalo’s siblings, were conjoined at the beak—a rare condition that forced them to share a single thought, which they wielded like a harpoon. They’d hover near the parlor’s clavichord (which no one played but everyone accused of playing itself), screeching in unison: “Existence is a poorly tied sailor’s knot! Stop untying it!” Their contempt for Cephalo’s work was rivaled only by Aunt Medusa, a sentient jellyfish who’d married into the family by clinging to Uncle Barnacle’s left ventricle during a hurricane. She pulsed venomous critiques from her gelatinous throne: “Your treatises lack sting! Where’s the venom? The urgency? You write like a shrimp with a thesaurus!”  Cephalo’s existential masterwork—Being and Ink: A Cephalopod’s Guide to Drowning—had begun as a pamphlet on the futility of crab migration. But after a hallucinogenic encounter with a disoriented sea cucumber (who mistook him for a psychiatrist), it metastasized into an 800-page indictment of oceanic consciousness. His central thesis? “To exist is to be perpetually dissolved by the very medium one calls home.” The family reacted as if he’d vomited ink on the sacred altar of clams.  Grandmother Coral, a stoic matriarch who’d petrified herself to avoid participating in conversations, cracked her limestone jaw to hiss: “You’ve confused depth with sinking, boy.” Grandfather Mangrove, a tangled mess of roots and grudges, erupted through the floorboards to roar: “Existentialism is a barnacle on the hull of productivity! Scrape it off before I disinherit your tentacles!” Only Cousin Anemone, a rebel with a cause who communicated through color changes, offered support—though their endorsement involved stinging Cephalo repeatedly while flashing the shade of “radical solidarity.”  The treatise’s completion triggered a chain of disasters. The parlor’s walls began secreting pages of Cephalo’s manuscript, their text dissolving into the water like suicidal ideations. The jellyfish chandeliers started reciting Camus, their B-flat sighs warping into dirges. Aunt Medusa attempted to eat Chapter 12 (“The Abyss Gazes Also”), only to regurgitate a swarm of existential tadpoles that immediately questioned their purpose. Uncle Barnacle, ever the pragmatist, glued himself to a walrus skull and declared bankruptcy.  Cephalo’s father retaliated by summoning a congress of squid lawyers, who inked subpoenas accusing the treatise of “emotional piracy.” The twins organized an intervention, binding Cephalo with kelp ropes and screaming, “If life is meaningless, then this”—they gestured to a nearby pufferfish bloating itself into a sphere—“is art!” The pufferfish, overhearing, deflated in existential shame.  By the time the treatise’s final page dissolved (its last line: “We are all ink, pretending to be words”), the family’s reality had unraveled into pure metaphor. The parlor became a Möbius strip of ennui. The clavichord grew teeth and ate the jellyfish. Grandmother Coral crumbled into a haiku. And Cephalo, now a spectral blur of ink and inquiry, realized his fatal error: he’d written the truth, and truth, in a surrealist universe, is the one thing that cannot float.  This excerpt condenses the absurdist tone, familial chaos, and thematic conflict while hinting at the escalating surreal consequences. Expanding to 70,000 characters would involve deepening each character’s backstory (e.g., Aunt Medusa’s failed career as a venomous haiku poet), amplifying digressions (a 2,000-word tangent on the “taxonomy of melancholy” as debated by bioluminescent plankton), and layering sensory excess (the smell of ink mixed with regret, the taste of unresolved arguments). The narrative would spiral into increasingly derailed metaphors—e.g., a subplot where Cephalo’s treatise manifests as a sentient ink-cloud that seduces the twins into a cult of “nihilist origami”—while weaving in philosophical parodies (Kant’s Critique of Pure Tentacle, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Ink). Dialogue would devolve into non sequiturs (“Your epistemology smells of low tide!”), and every object (a sentient armchair made of octopus skin, a grandfather clock filled with existential brine) would rebel against the plot’s coherence, embodying the collapse of meaning Cephalo’s treatise unleashes.

By Carlos del Puente relatos