The article, though, says they throw things at other females too.* So it’s hard to say if the female is being relatable or just plain defensive. Cephalopods can squeeze through small openings. Escape from a boat squished through a tiny crack. Oh, to have these skills! Three hearts, plus gills, blue blood! They smell and taste with their suckers, shoot ink that can kill when inhaled, can change the color of their skin at will. They have nine brains, one for each of their eight arms. They can dream for brief spurts. When they dream they change color. They waste away and die after laying a single clutch of eggs. Mothers once. They eat their mates. If they don’t eat their mates, their mates die eventually, so maybe they’re not evil at all. Not anything like a human. Just merciful.

*Publisher’s Note:

“Female Octopuses Throw Things at Irritating Males, And Look, We Totally Get It” by Michelle Starr in Science Alert (31 August 2021); link retrieved on 11 January 2024:
https://www.sciencealert.com/female-octopuses-throw-things-at-irritating-males-and-that-s-so-relatable

Jessica Purdy

holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems and microfiction have appeared in Gargoyle, Gone Lawn, Litro, ONE ART, Radar, The Ekphrastic Review, The Night Heron Barks, and numerous others. Her books Starland (2017) and Sleep in a Strange House (2018) were both released by Nixes Mate Books.

Her recent chapbooks include You’re Never the Same: Ekphrastic Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023); and The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), poems based on dollhouse-scale dioramas by forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee which were collected in Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and used to train homicide investigators.

For a longer list of other publications, plus a portfolio excerpted from The Adorable Knife and published by Buttonhook Press in 2022, Murder in the House: The “Nutshells” of Frances Glessner Lee, visit the author’s website:

www.jessicapurdy.com