Da Minh paused. “I don’t know why you want this story. Nobody believes it. They threw me in jail, you know? Two months. Finally let me go, but all over the island people whispered I had done it. Why? Why would I do it?” He felt the old anger again, directed now at this woman across from him, at the glistening haze that cowled her head. DIANIMA. Hadn’t they done enough to him? They should pay more.

“As I said—I’m not here to judge you.”

“The thing—it didn’t come out of the water: it came from up the beach. I saw it—crawling along. Then when it was near Hien it…” He paused. “It stood up.”

He took another drink of the beer, finishing it this time. It was no good. Already too warm. But then the woman ordered another.

He would take the afternoon off. He would go for a swim. He imagined himself floating, half drunk, in the warm water.

But part of him was back on that beach on Hon Bay Canh. It wasn’t always like this when he tried to tell the story: Usually he just told it, almost without thinking. Usually it was a caricature—a few still images in his brain, simplified down for the telling. But this was different. He felt he was there again.

It had come down the beach—not out of the water. At first it was low to the ground, like a moving stain on the sand. And by the way it had moved he had known what it was: an octopus. But then it rose up, almost standing on the ends of its arms, like a man. Had that happened? Sometimes he thought he had imagined that part. It had almost seemed to take the shape of a man, to move like a man, to move its arms together like a man’s legs. Could that have been? It was not possible. But he knew it had happened. He had seen it.

By then he was screaming and running toward Hien, waving his arms. Hien, standing there with a grin on his face, looking into the water, spear at the ready, like nothing was happening at all. Hien’s smile turned into a look of confusion, but it was just confusion at what Da Minh was doing. And then the thing moved past Hien, pausing for only a moment, clinging to Hien for a second, waving its arms about. Then it dropped down and slid into the water.