By late afternoon, the squid stopped moving. Their bodies were about six inches long, the two tentacles almost the same length, and the eight arms were much shorter. Dee let Edmund and Polly stand on chairs at the sink while she showed them how to pull on the head so that the gloppy mess inside emerged. Dee wanted them to save the ink, and they found the sacs—silver beans in the head—and put them in a half-pint jar. They pried out the soft backbones, which were clear and iridescent: Polly held one up in front of her eyes and looked toward a lamp with a stained-glass shade. It was like looking through a soap bubble.

When Merle came home two days later he would draw a squid’s body precisely, explain the why and how of shooting ink, propulsion, the three hearts, the invisible gills, each with its own heart. He would label each body part: mouth and beak; the third, central, systemic heart; the penis or the ovaries; the siphon the animal used for everything from shit to eggs. No one knew yet that squid saw light with their skin, or that they hunted in packs and their arms had a mind of their own, or that their beaks could punch through bone.

Dee saved the arms and tentacles, but she trimmed away the eyes, and the round cross sections with pupils on the sides shone up from a pillow of guts at the bottom of the sink, making Polly’s skin shimmy. Dee scooped the mess into a bowl and let Edmund hurl it into the yard, and within a few minutes a crow and May were fighting over the bits, while Lemon, chained just out of reach, watched in despair. A flash of green, the parrot—male? female?—jeering from the fence, saying poor doggy stupid doggy.

Edmund and Polly didn’t know how to cook yet. They didn’t know how to do anything. Dee made dough, and showed them how to roll pici noodles, no different than rolling little clay worms while she threw pots in the greenhouse. She fried a few of the tentacles in a batter and they ate them with salt and a lemon from her window tree. Dee chopped garlic and some of the tentacles and mixed in parsley and an egg and bread crumbs she’d buttered and toasted in a skillet. Edmund and Polly helped her stuff the mess in the squid bodies but did not try to sew the slippery flesh closed. Dee’s fingers were huge and crooked—she slammed around a pan Polly could barely lift—but the real problem was her eyes: She needed to bring the bodies up to nose level to insert the needle, over and over, as she stood on one foot and rested her other knee—the one attached to the bumpy shin that had broken so badly in a fall—on the stool.