The first: a fat, fleshy body, like a spider’s, boneless and mushy, and a pinched old-woman’s face, blue with cyanosis. It has four flat and awkward hands, unopposable thumbs, but climbs surprisingly well for all of that. It clings to the corners of walls and the headboards of beds. Its head rotates all the way around, like an owl’s. It doesn’t talk, but it chatters, meaningless strings of words, alchemy prognosis inevitable shenanigan whisky tattletale, on and on.

The second: all hands, hundreds of them, growing out of a center that is all shoulder, no body. The arms are well-muscled but not massive, like freight worker’s arm, not weightlifters. The fingers are blunt and calloused. When it moves it rolls along, palms slapping against the concrete, breaking branches aside, ripping through ivy. It talks, discourses on mathematics and astrology, fingers making lips and tongue, sturdy wrists vibrating like larynges.

The third: immobile and short, an angry, bristling fireplug, domed cephalopod eyes jutting out of the side and a tripartite beak blooming out of the top of the head. When I was in fourth grade we dissected squid, and I had to go into the bathroom halfway through to vomit into the sink because of the smell. Here again is that squid, grown large, angry and challenging and dead.