I found that, with octopus, bigger is not better. I had had little rings of fried squid before and they hadn’t been so chewy. But my octopus was so chewy that I swallowed most of the pieces whole after I’d chewed them for a long time and as I chewed them, the crisp fried batter came off and left rubbery octopus that started to taste fishier and fishier and reminded me more and more of how slimy the octopus had looked in the bucket when it was dead and how the water bubbled up around it in the sun by the kitchen door before Lucrezia’s mother had thrown it into the kitchen sink. Then I started to feel the little suckers with my tongue and I looked down at my arm where I still had faint round marks from its sucking on me, and I wondered if the ones in my mouth were the same suckers that had made the marks.

“How are you enjoying the catch of the day?” Dad asked.

I said it was great and that it was “the best fish I’ve ever tasted.”

“You can’t beat really fresh seafood,” Mom added.

“Nope, I guess you can’t,” I agreed.

I kept eating and eating. It turned into an endless nightmare. Chewing and chewing, I got fuller and fuller and Dad said it sure smelled good and that if it wasn’t for his thorn in the flesh, “I’d have some, it smells so good.”

When I remembered how that yellow sack had smelled when the Banini cut it with his knife and how it oozed stuff that looked like spit, when your mouth is really full of spit because you’ve saved it to spit over the balcony and see if you can hit the line of ants going to the dead mouse on the flagstones by the house, that’s when I threw up. Not a little bit but a lot and not neatly the way I saw Mom get sick once, just sort of coughing a little up, but hard, what Mom said later was “projectile vomiting.”

Rachael pitched over backward in her chair as she tried to get away from me, and Janet threw herself sideways and hid under the table.

Dad stood up and said, “Damn that octopus!” And since he never swore, except at Mom when he was fighting with her, I knew he was very upset.

Mom jumped up as if she had sat on a very sharp fork and said, “Oh dear!” Then she looked at Dad and said in a shrieky sort of voice, “Ralph, he’s vomiting all over!” And Dad shouted, “I can see that! Do you think I’m a moron?”