The first sighting was filed as a clerical error. A cat, the report said, had been pulled up in a shrimping net off the shelf and seemed entirely unbothered by the fact that the back half of it was a shrimp. It washed its face. The net, it ignored.
Subsequent observations only deepened the confusion. The front responds to its name, sulks when ignored, and demands to be let in and then immediately out. The back half does what shrimp do, which is to say it curls, flicks, and occasionally backs into furniture at speed.
No taxonomist has agreed on where to shelve it. The mammal people will not have it. The crustacean people are politely horrified. For now it sits in the drawer marked uncertain, between a winged eel and a frog that pays rent.
It does not eat what either half should eat. It will not be photographed from the left. It hums, faintly, when the tide turns. We have stopped trying to explain the thing and started simply writing down what it does.
