The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster. —Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus

It can be deadly work. In some corners of nature, children gain strength by eating their mothers alive.

This soil was a part of her, and she would one day become a part of it.

Perhaps it was because he was her eldest, but more likely it was because he took after her more directly than Freddie did, and so she sometimes fell into the unfair habit of judging him as an extension of herself.