He doesn’t understand it; it’s like she deliberately won’t let him understand. They used to share everything, but now? Now he can’t tell what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, and he misses her. Boobs or no boobs, he misses the person she used to be and he misses the person he was around her, he misses the people they were, back before she met the octopuses.

He knows it’s not the octopuses’ fault, and he knows it’s not this octopus’s fault: this one, glaring at him with her slitted pupils, as she tends to her swaying lengths of eggs.

He doesn’t really want to fight her, and of course he won’t pop her precious foetuses. He might be lurking and mouth-breathing through his hookah like a creep, but he’s not a monster. And he would never have left that lure lodged in the octopus that lived in the rockpool if it really was hooked, no matter how much Seamus tempted him.

But the thing is, if it’s not the octopuses’ fault, then whose fault is it?

Jem sometimes wonders if his life would be better if he never spent time at this wharf—this wharf tucked up in the crook of the southern headland of this place. This place he lives, this place he breathes, this place he knows in the air and under the water. This place he loves so much. He does love it, and yet Jem wonders, now, as he motors towards the wharf and spots the dead shark lashed to the side of the boat, if his life would be better if he never spent time here at all.

Fuck them.

Fuck them.

Fuck them for catching a shark that size—which everyone knows is going to taste like shit—and not releasing it. Fuck them for playing that animal against their engine until it became so spent, it lost; it’s not a fair fight and just because they’ve forked out the cash for the equipment doesn’t mean they’re legends. Fuck them for towing the exhausted shark backwards, forcing water the wrong way down its gills, drowning it. Fuck them for tying the corpse to the side of their boat like they’re some kind of Caesar parading in some kind of triumph, showing off a spoil of war, which has bloody stumps where its dorsal fin and tail should have been, marking a trail of bloody glory all the way back to the wharf. Who cares that it’s too big for them to kill swiftly and too big for them to wrestle into the boat? Who cares that because it’s too big they had to strap it down like that and they had to forcibly drown it like that. Because they didn’t have to do it; they could have just let it go when the game was over.

They could have let it go.

Fuck them. Fuck them for their smug grins, for their sweaty bum cracks and their aching arms, and fuck them for the record they probably didn’t break but sacrificed this life just to double check. Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them.