My arms are bound by thick blue bands of rubber. I want to show the children who come to peer at me through glass how to scissor their enemies, exert, with one claw, pressure of a hundred pounds per square inch. In a Dutch still life, boiled orange and arranged with shell slashed down the middle beside a toppled goblet, a dish of butter softening in the heat, a tray of nearly moldering lemons, I am meant to be one of many emblems of vanitas: how all things swiftly yield to ruin even before they're buried in the soil, though I and my kind have been known to live up to a hundred years. I am a lesson in deconstructed anatomy: brain in throat, teeth in the abdomen, kidneys in the head; ears in the legs, filaments for taste in the feet. Once, I grew to a length of almost five feet— how easy it would have been to be eater rather than the eaten.
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