Devilfish Annotated Read-Along · Chapter 24

End Notes

1. 1
   I went back and forth on this line for a while, because "soft" is probably not the word most people reach for when they imagine touching an octopus. But I’ve read descriptions of people who have touched an octopus (sadly, I haven’t yet had the chance to myself) and they have described it as soft. An octopus doesn’t have a shell, or scales, or any bones underneath its skin, just muscle arranged in three directions at once. However, that same skin can change its texture in less a second, via its papillae—tiny muscular bumps they can raise and flatten to go from smooth to spiky and back, which is how they can disappear against coral one moment and sand the next. So Elliot's skin is velvet right now because Elliot is calm. Mostly.
   
   Also, note what Declan does here—leading with touch instead of sight. He knows Elliot won't survive being looked at yet. He asks to see him only after he's already told him he's lovely. Read in context ↩
2. 2
   An octopus changes color using chromatophores—sacs of pigment in the skin, each ringed by muscles that pull the sac open or let it snap shut. In a real octopus, it's pretty much instantaneous, and it's under direct neural control, which means an octopus's skin is closer to a display screen than to a complexion. They flush dark red when agitated or aroused and go pale when frightened.
   
   Scientists think that octopuses are almost certainly colorblind, because they have only one visual pigment. So, one of the most spectacularly colored animals on earth puts on a show it probably can’t even see. Elliot is doing sort of the same thing here—the deep red is mostly for Declan's benefit, since Elliot has his eyes shut. Read in context ↩
3. 3
   More real octopus anatomy here—it's called the interbrachial web, a sheet of skin and muscle connecting the arms near their base, deepest at the center where they all meet. Octopuses use it as a net, ballooning it out over a rock and trapping whatever's underneath in a technique called web-over hunting. It's also, being thin skin over muscle with the arms' nerve supply running through it, an extremely sensitive piece of tissue.
   
   This isn’t how octopuses have sex, but come on, it was an absolute no-brainer for a half-human, half-octopus shifter. Read in context ↩
4. 4
   Oh, it 100% does have a mind of its own. An octopus has around half a billion neurons—roughly the count of a dog—but only a third of them are in the central brain. The rest live in the arms, something like forty million per arm, arranged in nerve cords that can process information and generate movement without checking in with the head office, so to speak. An arm can locate food, identify it, and pass it along toward the mouth while the octopus's brain is occupied with something else entirely. Severed octopus arms will still react to stimulus and still reach. Read in context ↩
5. 5
   I didn’t set out to draw comparisons between a trans person and a half octopus shifter, I really didn’t. But by this point, I knew there was a reason behind Joey’s resistance to going home to Nance and it really was while I was writing this chapter that I discovered that Joey is trans. Trans people have always existed and trans men in the nineteenth-century American West are actually better documented than most people expect. There was a man named Charley Parkhurst,  California stagecoach driver, called One-Eyed Charley, who drove the Santa Cruz routes for decades and appeared on a Santa Cruz poll list in 1868 (back before women had the right to vote, so to be on a poll list, he would have had to have been recognized as a man). When he died near Watsonville in December 1879, the neighbors preparing his body discovered he'd been assigned female at birth, and the story went national—the New York Times ran it in January 1880 under the headline "Thirty Years in Disguise." That's around eight years before this conversation. Declan probably would have heard about him. Read in context ↩
6. 6
   Hence the apology piano. Read in context ↩
7. 7
   The word “transgender” is a 20th century word, so it doesn’t appear in these books. It doesn’t have to, because Declan doesn’t need that specific word to understand who Joey is. Read in context ↩
8. 8
   This whole series turns on this theme: that a body is not a verdict, that the people who get to know yours are the ones you choose, and that being known is a thing you survive rather than a thing that destroys you. Elliot has spent twenty-four chapters certain that if anyone saw what he really was, it would end him. Declan hands him a man who has been living the opposite proposition on Elliot's own ship for two years.
   
   Declan is also, quietly, telling Elliot something about himself: I am someone you trusted to get close enough, and look, here I am, still here. Read in context ↩
9. 9
   Elliot. Dude. Read the room. Read in context ↩
10. 10
    This is the only time in the entire book Declan uses his captain's voice on Elliot, and I put it here on purpose. Everywhere else in this scene he's coaxing, joking, gentling. Here he doesn't negotiate at all. One syllable, no discussion.
    
    I know some readers would rather Elliot had gotten there on his own, or never slipped in the first place. But Elliot is a wealthy, sheltered, deeply conventional man having the worst week of his life, and a version of him who instantly says the right thing isn't a person, it's a caricature. I wanted to show a man being corrected by someone who loves him, taking the correction, and doing better. Read in context ↩
11. 11
    Elliot keeps trying to reduce himself to a single horrifying fact, and Declan will not let a single item stand alone—he buries it in an inventory of everything else that's also true. The joke at the end is the point. Declan finishes on something filthy because he needs Elliot's shoulders to come down before the next sentence lands. Read in context ↩
12. 12
    Elliot keep doing arithmetic on himself and he always subtracts. Declan does the same math a paragraph later and arrives at you've just got some new parts to enjoy. Nobody in this book is going to be able to argue Elliot out of his conclusion. Declan just keeps showing his work until Elliot starts checking it. Read in context ↩