Ancient Art of Usuzukuri​

Fiction by ​​​Kenton K. Yee

​As my mother tells this story, half a decade before my birth, a tattooist adored how a cashier at an Amazing mall multitasked with six arms, each tessellated with suction cups. But the tattooist, being a typical male biped, was too shy to ask an octopus to dinner and too budget-conscious to spring for drinks. So he kept taking bric-a-bracs to her station, attempting to chat her into complimentary tatts for her suction cups.

The cashier had recently left the dark, slushy oceans of Europa in search of sunshine and validation above sea level in greater el-Aye. Whenever the tattooist whipped it out, the shiny star on his card of credit—and everything it meant according to Amazing’s subliminal ads—made her three hearts pity-pit-pat, rippling tides of orange, pink and purple across the skin of her bulbous head. Her friends said most earthlings only wanted to dice her tentacles and eat them either boiled and fused with wasabi, soy sauce & sushi rice, or barbecued and dipped in the oil of olives. But the tattooist wasn’t avoiding her eyes and wetting his lips. Although my destiny has only two arms and two legs, he sports a cute tattoo of Annie from Covert Affairs, she texted her mother.

It was she who invited him for dips at the Y. After their second date, again at the Y, she suggested they get a bite to eat at Amazing Poke across the street. “I never had the guts to go there alone,” she said. 

“Poke? Are you sure? How about Amazing Chuck-Fil-A? Amazing Wok?” he said. “Amazing Fi-Fie-Pho is amazing.”

Upon scanning the overhead menu, she said, “How’s their octopus?”

He turned beet red. 

She laughed. “Europaians can eat Earth octopuses, silly,” she said. “I’m dying to try it.”

“Wow,” he said. “Phew!”

He ordered two poke bowls topped with cilantro, pineapple, scallion, tuna and octopus and paid with his card of credit. They filled their water cups and settled on a small corner table.

“I’m a math major at You See el-Aye,” she said. “Planning to work a year before applying to PhD programs.”

He scrunched his nose. “Math?”

The cashier was squatting on her chair. In deference to the tattooist, she kept only two tentacles on the table. Her other four arms hung discreetly to her side, partly hidden in the folds of her slipover. “There is no satisfaction like when you prove a theorem,” she said. “Know what I mean?”

An octopus cube rolled off his plastic fork onto the tabletop. He stabbed it with his fork and stuck it into his mouth. “Guess what I’m going for.”

“I’m easily diverted,” she said. “Not great for a mathematician. Andrew Wiles had to work six years straight to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.” She jabbed at a cube of tuna. “I feel lost sometimes.”

“I’m in culinary school,” he said. “My goal is to open a sushi chain and market it as serving only 'humane kill' ingredients. The fashionistas will love it! I’m destined,” he said. “To become filthy rich, I mean. Can you handle abundance?” 

“I only care about proving theorems,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind being rich though.”

“Perfect. You gonna finish that tuna?” 

They honeymooned up north in Half Moon Bay and snapped up a condo in an Amazing development on Reno’s eastern fringe, where working class newlyweds still could afford starter condos. They spent three weeks with the cashier’s folks under the tundra of Europa, where she taught the tattooist to breathe slushy water—a miracle as he had no gills—and to recognize and avoid the traps set by interplanetary eel and octopus poachers. 

Back in Reno, she landed an apprenticeship at Chick-Dumpling Casino dealing cards, and drew throngs of tourists eager to play with a six-armed dealer. He graduated with a certificate in sushi cheffing and opened Splendid Sashimi. On Christmas Eve of their fourth year of marriage, the cashier—she will always be a cashier to us, though by this time she had risen to become Chick-Dumpling’s Chief Accounting Officer—gazed into the Amazing lemon-garlic roast hen and gurgled, “I’m lost. Where’s the briny pool to hatch our brood? I need to reproduce and apply to graduate school before I’m too old.”

The tattooist-sushi-chef tensed. With everything tied up in Splendid Sashimi, he was sliced thin liquidity-wise. Nonetheless, with  the help of the cashier’s salary, they were able to get a 30-year mortgage with a 5/1 ARM for a lakefront Tahoe bungalow whose price, according to Amazing Pillow, had doubled in the past year.

On the first afternoon in their new home, the cashier crawled into the briny pool and thrummed the glows of procreation. “Oy, this warm Earth liquid is arousing,” she growled, breast-stroking her six arms and flicking her two legs. “Hop in and let’s get started.”

The tattooist-sushi-chef’s brows drew together to form one long arcing brow. “I’ve been reading Amazing Wiki. You’re not going to shrivel up and die after our children hatch, are you, Mabelene?”
“Europaians aren’t Earth octopuses, silly,” she said. “When our kids are grown, look out! I’m going back to school to become a mathematician.” 

So he kicked off his Amazing PayLess loafers and pants and leaped into her arms. 

“Do you know that evolution has optimized the tessellation pattern of my suction cups for maximum traction, dear?” 

“Ummm-mmmmmmmm.”

“And that each of my cups can taste like your tongue, smell like your nose, grip like your fingers, and arouse like your nipples?”

“Um hmm.”
​
“Don’t my suction cups remind you of topological fiber bundles?”

She took maternity leave, strung her eggs into strands, ate for 2,000—four years in succession. She pushed the tattooist-sushi-chef to open Splendid Sashimi outlets in six cities and inspire a fad in “raw insects, household molds, and Venusian fungi.” 

During her fourth maternity leave, the couple’s hard work started to pay off. The morning after Splendid Sashimi raised twelve billion dollars in an initial public offering, the cashier resigned from Chick-Dumpling and hired a recycler to haul away her five hundred pounds of accounting manuals. When their broker informed the couple they had achieved a coveted status known to Wall Street insiders as “easy street,” the cashier was already investing in “poetry, comics and other artsy stuff” through NFTs. The tattooist-sushi-chef funded 8,000 trusts for the kids, paid off the bungalow, and hired a housekeeper, 801 nannies, a pool cleaner, and a sushi chef for the family. He began taking extended trips to scout exotic edibles as well as new locations for Splendid outlets.

The cashier, left alone on Earth to attend our PTA meetings and swim meets, started spending time in the kitchen with Chuck, our sushi chef. Chuck taught her to julienne carrots and cucumbers. Then she graduated to thin slicing tuna, cockroaches, and octopuses. She was thin slicing an octopus tentacle when the cashier amputated two inches of her own left tentacle by mistake. 

Chuck gasped. He hollered for Amazing Alexa to call 9-1-1. 

“Don’t be silly, Chuckie,” she said. “I’m not like Earth octopuses. Europaians are regenerative. In fact, cut me again.” She plopped another tentacle on his slicing board. “Thin slice me.”

Chuck froze.

“Chop chop, Chuck! Thin slice my tentacle.”

Chuck slit off the tip. 

The cashier squealed. 

He shaved off another ever so thin slice. Then another. 

“Faster. 
“Faster! 
“FASTER!”

From that day on, the cashier indulged in having Chuck thin slice her tentacles. Every day Chuck worked, which was five days a week, she demanded he thin slice a tentacle. Never two tentacles or part of one, but one and up to the armpit. We weren’t permitted to watch, but the loud squeals of delight from the master bedroom (where she had taken to having it done) and her flushed complexion and engorged eyes and lips during dinner afterwards revealed the high that being thin-sliced gave her loud and clear. I never saw my mother pinker and giddier than after a slicing session with Chuck. I never found out what Chuck did with the cashier’s slices, but he served the most delicious octopus sashimi I’ve ever had during this period. 

Since it took a week for each tentacle to regenerate, the cashier was typically crawling around with five stubs of varying lengths. But whenever the tattooist-sushi-chef was home for the weekend, on Monday she’d have seven stubs and only one fully regenerated tentacle left to ambulate with. 
As much as my mother was expressive and (mostly) transparent, my father was distant and poker-faced. If the tattooist-sushi-chef disapproved of the stubbiness of his wife’s extremities, or Chuck thin slicing his wife during his absences, he never let on. I pestered my mother (but never my father, for he was hopelessly distant from us kids between trips) about my father’s absences. To be honest, we just hoped that our father was another rat-race workaholic building interplanetary wealth that would compound to our eventual benefit.

During my father’s frequent and long absences, the cashier’s mood oscillated between expanding blue-ring fits of rage and yelps of thin-slicing delight. In his presence, though, she acted happy. If my mother suspected any martial betrayals, she didn’t let on, at least not in front of us—except once. One night, about a year or so into her thin slicing, we were enjoying one of our rare dinners with my father home. 

“I love the raw octopus, Ma,” one of my younger siblings said. “It’s my favorite dish.” 

“That’s so sweet of you,” she said. “Thank you.” 

She looked down the table to my father and flapped one of her regenerating stubs. “My arms are stubby. They’re ugly, aren’t they, dear.” 

“They’re beautiful, Mabelene.”

“I thought you liked them when they were long.”

“They’re so supple when regenerating.”

That night, my father slept outside with the dog. In the morning, he fired Chuck and replaced him with an entremetier, who made a delicious creme of poke over scrambled eggs that still makes me salivate. Chuck’s abrupt departure left my mother no choice but to invite my father back to their bedroom for raucous thin slicing sessions over the next few days. On the morning my father departed for his launch, she was a sextuple amputee with no arms and two legs. We had to spoon feed her for four days until she grew back her stubs. 

With Chuck gone and nobody to thin slice her, my mother became surly and lethargic. She took to gorging on creme de poke while watching cable news all day. By the end of the month, her tentacles looked like elephant trunks tiled with suction cups. Even so, she maintained a nonchalant daze until eight of my siblings didn’t come home from school one day. 

An occasional poached sibling or four wasn’t new for our family of, then, almost 7,900, but a mollusk-sushi fad had spiked per-pound prices for Earth octopuses, which humans habitually mistook us for, and caused a global spike in the poaching of those with Europaian looks. (Visages of my siblings being boiled, brined, thin-sliced and devoured with seaweed and rice woke me up many a night for we had been losing almost a dozen siblings per month in the three months prior.) The abrupt loss of eight that day triggered something new in my mother. At dinner, she sprayed ink all over the entremetier‘s festive creme de crab over scrambled eggs. “My titan of sushi cheffing,” she gurgled to the grizzled spider repairing a cobweb draping my absent father’s chair, “your dedication paid for our bushels of bird eggs and crates of Dungeness crab, but you’re not here to share them with our offspring. Do you even know their names?” With that, she ordered Amazing Alexa to tell my father to come home “asap or else”—something she had never done before.

I’ve never bought into (nor experienced firsthand) the biped notions of marriage and fidelity, so I can only guess what was on my mother’s mind. Does he have a secret biped family? Did he have our offspring kidnapped as bargaining chips in preparation for divorce? I’m a romantic in one heart, a realist in my second, and an intuitionist in my third, and I believe what happened next was this: In a suite over Venus, the tattooist-sushi-chef, hearing of his wife’s anguish from Amazing Alexa, jerked back from the brink of new-found infatuation. I see him tell Miss 8-nog, the uni-legged bot who was his new marketing assistant, to take leave of his lap. In my mind’s eye, Miss 8-nog shrieks angrily and pogos out into the plush forest of soft lights equidistantly spaced along the corridor walls of the Amazing Hotel & Spa, past KFC where earlier she had enjoyed chicken-fried tako over vinegar-seaweed rice with the tattooist-sushi-chef, and back to her recharging station. 

My mother sat in the livingroom with our biggest usuzukuri knife for two and a half days until my father arrived. She led him upstairs to their bedroom and slammed the door. We gathered outside giggling and shushing each other, anticipating loud squeals of delight. Instead, we heard struggle and frustration.

“Come mon, what’s taking so long?”

“Either this knife needs sharpening or your tentacles have toughen.”

“Go downstairs and get the meat cleaver.”

The bedroom door swung open. “What da? No eavesdropping! Scram!”

We scattered to other rooms as my father raced downstairs. After he raced back up and slammed the bedroom door, we swarmed back to our positions. 

Whomp! 

Whomp!

“Got one!”

“Hack them all off at the shoulder. Unbundle my fiber, big guy!”

“Uuuuuugh!” 

Whomp!

“Uuuuuugh!” 

Whomp!

“Come mon, harder! Hack it harder!”

“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh!” 

Whomp!

“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh!” 

Whup.

“Aaa-aaaaaaaaaaa! Aaa-aaaaaaaaaaa!

“I—I cut myself!”

“Holy hell! Amazing Alexa. Ambulance! Man with deep gash.”

“I’m bleedinnnnnnnn!”

The door wasn’t locked. We burst in. My father had severed his femoral artery and was bleeding out. My mother squeezed a good tentacle around his thigh and stopped the bleeding until the ambulance transported them to the hospital. Surgeons had to amputate the whole leg to stop the bleeding. My mother went into surgery the same afternoon to remove her remaining tentacles. Doctors prescribed a statin to inhibit excessive size when she regenerated. 

During their recuperation, my mother spent twelve hours every day sucking his stub with the suction cups of her regenerating tentacles. His stub sprouted a tentacle tiled with suction cups and a human foot at its tip. His new tentacle would prove stronger and more flexible than my father’s original leg, enabling my father to run faster and leap higher than human NBA stars into his nineties. 
Even with statin therapy, surgeons had to re-amputate my mother’s tentacles six times before they settled back to their natural pre-thin-slicing size. Through it all, my mother used her regenerative suction cups to help fellow patients regenerate body parts. Her amazing results launched the field of regenerative therapy, in which Europaians helped earthlings regenerate everything from limbs to organs and even memories. 

But regenerative therapy was not my mother’s calling. She found her calling soon after receiving a text from Chuck’s wife. (Chuck was the sushi chef whom the tattooist-sushi-chef had fired for thin-slicing the cashier.) “Chuck got poked by a fugu fish. I heard about your regenerative suctions cups on the news, Mabelene. Can you please try sucking Chuck back to life?” 

The following week, a mortbot wheeled my mother down to the hospital’s morgue, where Chuck’s corpse was defrosting on a stainless steel table. Though her tentacles were stubby at the time, my mother shimmied up a table leg onto the cold metal surface. After days of micro-asteroid pelting inside an Amazing USPS cargo hold, his frozen face must’ve been densely pocked. 

As she suctioned Chuck’s lifeless chest and abdomen, I imagine her talking to her old thin-slicer. “In Europa, food swam to us as free as Earth’s air. Who knew Earth would be so... Look, Chuck, I’m sorry I got you fired. You’re one heckuva thin slicer! 

“Hell, you’re still frozen. I’ll come back when you’ve thawed.” 

A mop bucket was sitting under the edge of the table. Thinking it was refreshments, the cashier dove in, spattering the tessellated tiles with rust-colored blotches. 

She licked her lips. Hmmm, waxy and metallic like tap water from cheap paper cups. The taste brought her back to a poke bowl topped with cilantro, pineapple, and scallion, that amazing day at Amazing Poke in el-Aye when she first confided in the tattooist her aspirations for making an amazing contribution to mathematics. To at once fall in love and see stars in fiber bundles. By golly, my fling with thin-slicing was my subconscious calling me back to mathematics. Now that our kids are almost grown, I have no excuse. How the hell did I get diverted into accounting?

Kenton K. Yee

Kenton K. Yee has placed short fiction and poetry in
The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, RHINO, Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, Southeast Review, Puerto del Sol, LIT, Los Angeles Review, Hobart, PANK, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and other journals. A theoretical physicist, he writes from Northern California. Follow him on social media: 
@scrambled.k.eggs (FB); @kentonkyeepoet (IG).