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"The Terrapin" is a short story by Patricia Highsmith. Based on the difficult relationship she had with her own mother, the story revolves around a young boy, Victor, who is emotionally abused by his difficult, haughty mother, an illustrator of children's books.
The terrapin of the title, a small tortoise purchased by his mother for cooking, suffers an agonizing death when she drops it into the boiling pan. This event pushes young Victor over the edge—he believes he heard it scream—and during the night he butchers his mother with a kitchen knife for revenge. The story ends while he is being examined by doctors in a psychiatric hospital.
Many experts have often compared "The Terrapin" to a scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that features the consumption of live clams. The scene revolved around a walrus and a carpenter who befriended a bunch of clams and then ate them. These clams have been described by experts as "ugly as a darn blobfish".