Things I Never Knew about Seahorses

Dawn Miller

My father never framed any of his degrees. Marine Biology. Environmental Science. Conservation Ecology. The university-stamped documents sat rolled within their protective cylinders in the back of a closet, forgotten for decades.
          The other day, he found the white tubes, unfurled the thick papers coiled inside, and hodgepodged them to the wall in his study because he said he liked the curls of the Ms, the loops of the Ls, the peaceful curvatures of the Bs.
          “This Frank fellow must’ve been a smart man,” he said, tapping the name on the diplomas with a liver-spotted hand, then wiped a smear of sticky glue from his elbow.

When I was young, my father said Mom and him were just like seahorses.
          “They are slow, you see,” he said. “Searching for a new mate is dangerous. It’s much safer to stick with one significant other.”
          “So, the only reason for monogamy is fear you’ll get caught if you stray?” Mom teased, and Dad wrapped his arms, like the monkey-like tail of a seahorse, about her waist, pulled her in close, and kissed her neck until she laughed.

Seahorses can be as small as a pine nut. Or as large as a banana. In a human brain, the hippocampus regulates learning and memory.
          “See here,” Dad said, tracing an illustration in Gray’s Anatomy when I was an undergraduate and praying for acceptance from one of my top-pick medical schools, “hippocampi are situated on the left and right hemispheres of the brain, located deep within the temporal lobe.” He looked at me with a glint in his eyes. “There’s two of them. Each with a head. A body. A tail. Just like a pair of seahorses.”

Floating in their secret, silent world, seahorse mates greet each other daily.
          Hello! I’m so glad to see you again! I imagine one seahorse saying to the other as they dance around, noting a specific speckle on its mate’s flesh-covered bony plates or a well-loved curve of its tube-like snout. Their greeting is a way to maintain their bond. A way of saying I’m happy you’re still alive. I remember you.

Despite being aquatic creatures, seahorses are surprisingly poor swimmers.
          “It’s another example of life’s ironies,” Dad says as he rips out a page from an old National Geographic magazine, then glues the photo of seahorses hitchhiking on a strand of seaweed to the wall, blotting out the words honors and achievement on his diplomas.

Sometimes, when my mother and father go for a walk, Dad doesn’t remember which house is his, and I imagine seahorses colliding in his brain, rearing up against each other like panicked horses in a firestorm.
          Sometimes, my mother and I find Dad wandering on a nearby street. Or pacing the perimeter of the fence looking for the way out. Always, he looks afraid.
          “I’m adrift,” he says to me when I’m home for a few days’ break from my job at the hospital. The skin beneath his eyes is softened, like bruised apples, and I think about mercy and forgiveness and all the things I should say to him but don’t. Instead, I place my hand over his, tell him he’s safe. Tell him everything will be all right.

Sometimes, when I visit my parent’s house in the mornings before I start my shift, my father looks up from the steel-cut oatmeal and blueberries he’s eaten every day for breakfast since I was little and says I look familiar.

On average, seahorses live three years. The average life expectancy of someone with vascular dementia is roughly five.
          “Fun fact,” Dad said to me long before he got sick. “Seahorses are the only species of fish that hold hands.”
          I think about how the creatures use their long tails to grasp onto each other. How it must give comfort when they are hiding from a hungry crab or tangled in a clump of seaweed.
          How it must help to know they aren’t alone, even when they’re drowning in the deep, dark cradle of the sea.

Dawn Miller work appears in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Pithead Chapel, Vestal Review, Toronto Star, Room Magazine, Bath Flash Fiction anthologies, Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025, and elsewhere. She lives in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect on IG @dawnmillerwriter and Bluesky @dawnwriter.bsky.social.

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