The Kraken Sleeps

“Only time shakes the Kraken.” That’s what Franks always told me. But I never really understood it until a few days after Pierrot died.
The museum was a lonely place after that, let me tell you. Pierrot was larger than everybody in there. A frothing personality, a trembling soul, his shrieking laughter filled your bones with vitality and your chest with warmth. He was like fruit for the soul. Everyone tried to get their five-a-day of Pierrot.
Pierrot once lifted me up onto his shoulders. It was a sad day for me. I’d broken up with my girlfriend - a week before - and then my grandma died. Pierrot caught me crying in the storeroom. He didn’t check a step when he saw the tears rolling. Instead, barging right into me and then picking me up as if I were a piece of bread that he was going to slam in the toaster and make warm, he carried me high, high about the room so that I could see those dusty shelves that usually I wasn‘t able to reach.
And he knew I wasn’t allowed to use the stepladder ‘cos my balance is poor, but he put me up there - left me right on the shelf and said: “Stay up there, stay high until you feel like coming down. Give me a call when you know you’re done.”
Just then he walked away, whistling. I heard his footsteps walk down the hall some way and then he got out the whizzer and started polishing the corridor, so that even if I wanted to get down I couldn’t, not for the moment.
I sat up there for two hours while Pierrot finished the work, and I sat and thought about grandma and my life up to that point and my life to come.
Later Pierrot came back and helped me down. We both handed in our time cards and went home and Pierrot never said anything to me about the time I’d sat up on the highest shelf while he did all the work.
Pierrot scared you, but he made you feel like you could fulfil something in your life.
So why did Franks call Pierrot the Kraken? Hell, I didn’t even know what a kraken was until two days after Pierrot's funeral.
I was in the library and I was enjoying a book about strange creatures that this kid had left on the reading bench. Mermaids, Selkies and Samiads - all interesting parts of the chapter on sea-creatures (did you know that selkies were able to take human form and, if caught, had to live as the betrothed of their human captor, unless they found their selkie skin?) - but the kraken…
The kraken was a massive creature, a many tentacled beast related to tales of colossal squid attacking the boats of merchants crossing the various trade oceans of this world. The open ocean is a barren place - “more devoid of life, perhaps, than the great land deserts of this world” - but was it devoid enough for a creature to want to attempt to chew on a large galleon? Well, maybe, and that’s the kraken. Nothing is too big for the kraken to tackle.
I guess that’s it. I think that must be why. That Franks is a succinct fellow. I’m glad he never gave a eulogy at Pierrot's funeral, though.