"…oh cousin cousin I wept with fear at the fish market today at those eyes yellow and green set in their bright dead heads standing to attention on leather at the soft bodies lying limp in their silver shirts, at jaws speared through with reeds, ten fish strung on a reed, cheap! cheap! the sellers shout and their cries form an invisible crowd of their own which mingles with the human crowd and the air between us is so stuffed with noise so close and tight that it filled my ears my eyes my mouth my nose and I became dizzy, airless, forgetting to breath while the shellfish fought for life in their wet leather buckets extruding their tubes and tongues with sighs as the air popped on their lips: certain shellfish are cheaper even than speared fish and those buckets are the most crowded because people buy them 'in bulk' as they say and the buckets clatter dimly as they swing them the water slops about inside there are spills and puddles form on the ground which grows darker and slippery and smells of salt and the inner workings of dead fish, their lubricant under my feet, the harsh words like anger in the air, the smell, the eyes and bellies and heads and dun-coloured guts, off cuts rich, moist and vermilion shot through with the pale pretty pottery of their bones' the roe, slabs of eggs bound together with strings retained from the wombs of their mothers, flesh white and red, gut-linings for soup, the casings of hearts, the biggest fish lying like complete torsos with mouths sprouting in the place of necks and eyes on their chests, their limbs fanned and pasted flat against their bodies and then hack, hack, the layers of fat in the torso are laid bare along the sides of canyons cut into the meat, sweet white undefended fat, hack hack away with the tail and the torso is joyfully disarmed of any hint of the real animal and I fell as though they are stripping me of my memory as I watch. Was that really a fish? Those white tongues of meat? Those clever rectangles?

Sick, I turn to the curling muscular tentacles chopped off octopi and at the sight of those purple horns twisting on themselves (connected, somehow, to that street in Gum Gooloo?) I touch the cords in my throat and on my wrist and the back of my hand: I share the same tense scaffolding with the deceased but mine are still in me and not lying on a strip of cold skin next to my head, that head with a point which used to part the water but which today stands like a cheap hat next to my severed arms, cheaper than the cheapest shellfish is an octopus' head, but the tentacles are expensive, a treat I suppose, among meat eaters.

The squid are not as vividly coloured as the octopus, their skin has the wasted look of old bones but there is no corresponding hardness in them, not even muscle, they are limp, the animal is dead, deader than any other creature here, their eyes do not have the alertness of the fishes' green eyes, they do not kiss the air as shellfish do or wriggle when I touch them as do the grey-black prawns with their bulging, dark pips for eyes, no the squid's eyes are curved back into its head, drained of fluid, and there is no suggestion of a final struggle or of an intelligence barely departed, no sadness, only death, the squid is an emblem of pure death accepted without alarm or malice and it was at this that I wept at death stripped of its aura, my mind was made naked and I cried."