She

She sits in wait in the shallow end, body drawn up beneath her head, which bobs lightly in the waves. The men walk up to her without prompting, whole clouds of them. They bend down, suit ties caressing the water, sunglasses falling off. A million hands drop down through the water's veil and caress her. The little boys, bolder than their fathers, plunge their hands straight into her, exploring her many petals, screech-laughing in joy as she sticks to them with her perpetually wet, electrically charged skin. They have never felt anything like this.

The others don’t come near her. They left a while ago, she thinks, but she doesn’t remember when. They hang back in the safety of the cove. When the tide rolls in, as it always does at around ten a.m., they tilt their heads towards her, eyes closed in bliss as the foamy waves batter their bodies and send their hair flying. The waves want to push them back to her, but they cling to the rocks for dear life. No one wants to wash out to sea.  

Once, she remembers being with them. But the men didn’t like that: all of them hanging back, just out of their reach. So, one morning, under the cover of dark, gigantic, faceless hands plucked her from her eternal seat and then, after a gentle, swaying movement, placed her directly in the forefront, where all the people clustered to gawp. She was their offering to the people.  

The rest were display, they said.  She is the one you can touch.  

When the people arrived in the morning, entering the room exactly as the tide did, she laid back and closed her eyes. They petted her, enjoying the way her skin stuck to their fingers with a fuzzy kiss. The girls usually didn’t grab on her like the men did, they just looked. Often, they pointed out the others, sheltering in their cave. “Why are they all back there?”

“That one's pretty,” they said, pointing, or else: “I like the color of that one.”

Sometimes, the little girls would just gawp. They had pairs of tiny, thoughtful eyes that stared at the women, little camera lens pupils screwing up to eat up the image of their many fleshy bodies. The men had actual cameras. The men took the women in as one large, flowy mass of bodies and hair—a mural—but the little girls tended to stare at only one. Stare and stare and stare. More often than not, the girls had pale, watery eyes and limp, mousy hair that danced like ribbons on the water’s surface. They wanted to get close, but they seldom touched. 

She didn’t look back up at the girls when they stared at her, just closed her eyes and leaned back as far as she could. Their eyes were almost as bad as their hands. But she could hide from neither. 

Of all the things you could look at, the tide pool was not the most interesting. There was also a duo of dancing men, who would spin circles around one another in the deep pool. People watched them, blind to their dancing, but attracted to the foreign design of their graceful, streamlined bodies. There was also a shallow area where the kids could play, as well as a gift shop full of flashy items that you could twist around your arm or hang on your bedroom door. They had rubber tentacles for sale in multicolor, cups with jiggly little blobs of fluid inside, like little lava lamps. They even had hats in the furry forms of fake sea life. She got used to seeing little girls and tall dads in squid hats: long, suckered, limp arms trailing behind them when they walked, idly collecting dust on the floor, or else brushing up against people’s behinds in the tight spaces.  

There was food there, too, and, every so often, someone would drop a sno-cone or sweaty popsicle into the tide pool, and it would wash over the girls like cloying perfume they’d have  to breathe in through their pores. Raucous laughter from the men.  Do it again! they’d jeer.  They love it! It’s snowing! 

Later, someone in a uniform would come by with a filter, but by then it was too late. There were whole clumps of women dead: large, limp marshmallows drenched in a salty-sweet technicolor tea. 

She would move if she could, get away from there—anywhere but there—but her legs never worked. She, like all of the other women in the interactive display, was doughy and soft. She bent in the waves: the contortions of her body are beautiful to them. The many hands that stretch from the women, towards the surface of the water, where their world meets the world of those that will forever hang over them.  

Do you remember where you come from? Do you remember where you come from? They whisper amongst each other. There is rumor of a place they are from, a wide place, with no boundaries, and no ugly gawpers. How did they get from this place to here? Does any one among them remember this place? They don’t—but they can all feel it, squirming in their DNA. In their collective, genetic memory, they know they are meant to be free. Someone has cut off their legs, they are meant to run.  

For the millionth time that day, she closes her eyes. Bit by bit, she tells herself, she will slowly begin to draw back, away from her many visitors. One day, she tells herself, she will reach the mouth of the cave and let it eat her whole. No eyes or hands will ever land on her again. Millimeter by millimeter she’ll move, back to the cave, out of the tank, and back to the wide open place. She’ll move so slowly that they won’t notice her until it’s already too late, and she’s vanished with the rest of nature.  

 

A little boy pushes his fingers into the tide pool at the Minnesota Zoo. The sole anemone within reach, a hot pink one, reaches its fat, off-clear fingers up to meet his, like a microcosm of the famous painting of Adam and God. Three sausage-y tentacles stick to him. “It tickles!” he giggles, pulling his hand away, ripping the connection like velcro.

“It’s an anemone,” his dad says, busy balancing the boy's little sister in his arms.  

There is a plaque near the touch pool, the copper worn down to a soft shine; the result of hundreds of thousands of fingers caressing it with their foreign oils. It sits heavily in front of the touch pool, almost demanding to be read before entry, like a safety guide. Most kids ignore it, tugging on their dad’s arm as they walk past it. Their mothers hang back to scan the sign for any words like“poisonous,” “bite” or “allergies.”  

 

Welcome to the Touch Pool! 

Say “hello” to our anemones, sea cucumbers, sea-squirts, sea-snakes and more! (Don’t worry when we say “snakes,” none of them bite! We think…)

Feel free to just feel around: interact with some of nature’s simplest yet most elegant creatures.  Did you know… Anemone’s don’t even have brains? It’s true! Anemones are closely related to jellies and corals, and, like them, have no centralized nervous system. Instead, they have a simple “nerve net” running along their body, which allows them to function on a very basic level. 

 

 Feel free to touch what you want, but please leave things clean for the next visitor. 

 

Fun Fact! Anemones do not need to interact with one another to reproduce. Instead, they release eggs and sperm into the water, which then collide to form new anemones. This process is known as “broadcasting.” Other methods of reproduction among anemones include “fission,” where the anemone splits itself (as in mitosis) or when a piece of an anemone breaks off and begins life elsewhere (aka “splitting”). For a species with no brain, they’ve found a pretty canny way to survive! 

 

The moms read the plaque and then look up. The only anemone within reach sits sentinel behind the large sign, while the other anemones crowd the back of the tank. Every two hours, a generator in the back of the pool, hidden inside a large, porous rock, pumps a viscous gush of water past the clinging anemones and down into the tank. “It mimics a real-life tide,” a plastic plaque explains, “so they feel right at home.”

On cue, the tide gushes, and a flood of tiny sea snakes are thrown to the front of the tank.  They wobble to and fro; frantic sperm searching for holes amidst the fake rocks. A father with a keen eye grabs one and pulls it out of the water with a triumphant shout filled with childish glee.  His teenage daughter whinnies at his heels until he sets it back in the tank, where it hangs in the shallow water in suspended animation. The other snakes hurry away from it. 

Sea slugs and octopi crawl past. A bubble of mucus blows by: a little underwater tumbleweed. Tiny fish dart to and fro in between the anemones. Are they meant to be eaten by them, or are they, too, just decoration?

Sea cucumbers crawl at an imperceptible pace around the tank, providing a bit of contrast to the anemones. Sea squirts cling to the fake rocks, their “mouths” opening and closing in a way that looks like breathing, though they might actually be eating.

The boy pokes a sea cucumber, and it heaves out all of its guts in front of him.  “Gross!”

The father, alarmed, quickly and quietly herds the boy away from the touch pool. “That’s enough, that’s enough,” he says, in that voice that a parent employs when they’re trying to distract their child, “let’s go look at the gift shop instead.”

The boy and his father are replaced by a group of young teenagers, occupying that stage between childhood and adolescence that is usually characterized by trips to Claire’s, ‘hang-outs,’ rather than ‘play-dates,’ and the discovery of Axe body spray. There are two boys and two girls. The boys immediately bend over the touch pool to gawp at the expended sea cucumber. They dare each other to touch its guts, and finally, both do. One of the girls, seeing this, becomes disgusted and walks off. The other draws closer to the touch pool, curious.

The boys have begun to touch the anemone, poking and prodding at it. One dares the other to squish it, and he does, pressing down just enough to cause its middle to pudge out without resulting in noticeable damage. The other boy giggles into his ear and they both begin to laugh about the appearance of the sea squirts.  

The anemone in the front catches the girl’s eye. It’s fat on one side now, like it’s got a hernia. Its sprawling head of hair reminds her of a sheath of palm fronds, swaying in the wind.  The boys quickly get bored and move on. She continues to look at the anemone, taking up the best viewing space until the group of teen boys behind her begins to loudly complain about it.  

She doesn’t move, just stares at the anemone. She stares, and stares and stares.

“Just touch it already!” one of the guys complains. 

She almost raises her hand to touch it, but thinks better of it and turns away. It looks agitated, in pain. Even though it can’t speak, the girl senses: it is in pain. Why else would all of the others be so drawn back, away from the crowds? Something about what they’re doing is harming this little creature. Even though it hasn’t got a brain, according to the placard, it must feel pain.  

One of the boys complains loudly enough that she moves. “Finally,” one of the others says, heaving a gigantic sigh.  

The boys spend a few minutes in front of the tide pool, not noticing or perhaps not caring about the scores of toddlers and exhausted mothers waiting patiently behind them. They take special joy in ripping the sea squirts from the rocks, and prodding the sea cucumbers until they are forced to expel their organs. By the time the toddlers do get to the touch pool, it is a gory scene of floating organs, dead sea-squirts, and a lonely anemone, sitting in the center of the massacre, now with two bulging hernias on either side.  

They shuffle aside, and their little family units are quickly replaced by more visitors. These ones have elementary school passes. Behind them is a small cadre of teenagers. Behind them is a group of adults. They dip into the water. Hand after hand after hand meets the skin of this one anemone, forever aroused in a state of hot pink, like a pudgy little clitoris in the center of the tide pool.  

“We love our sea creatures here at the Minnesota Zoo,” a canned, womanly voice says periodically over the loudspeaker.  “Please treat them with respect.”