Thinking About the Immortality of Crabs
The thin stretch of Atlantic sand where Cal had taken his first steps welcomed him for his last. Anxious energy bounced out through his heels and gave him a toddler’s gait as he staggered to the beach. Blind commitment moved him, each step placed with deep intention to keep him balanced on the knife-edge of grief. It cut through his bare soles and he bled a trail of scarlet memories turning silver in the moonlight.
The beach rose up to greet him as he crested the last of the low dunes. He’d chosen this place weeks ago for its tide, heavy with memories and hiding more than enough force to pull a man deep under the water and keep him there.
They’ll call me missing and leave it at that. There’ll be vigils but no funeral, no one will have to do all that again.
He laid feet gingerly on the chill sand and shivered. The cold whispered eulogies through the prickled surface of his skin. A funerary wind rushed silently over waves and beach, wisping fingers through his hair. It smelled like the bedroom he’d shared with his brother when they were kids.
This morning he’d woken in that room alone, as he’d done for the past month. His brother’s old bed was a blank space, a spot of void skipped over and untouched since his death. His mother wouldn’t even go in there anymore, but he had nowhere else to sleep.
I’m sorry, mom. Demolish the whole room, burn the house to the ground, it’s the only way out.
The last decision of his life moved through him like a tidal wave that washed out livelihoods, something enormous and destructive passing at last into a smothering calm.
Sand flattening underfoot. Salt lingering in the coastal breeze. The moon’s reflection glittering over the ocean in blankets of restless light. The world refining itself into a fine point, a relentless narrowing that cascaded through him into nothing.
A great cluster of breakers smashed together as he approached the water, each wave churning over the other. The final thrust of foam settled into a brackish film that continued to tremble and drag forward. Cal braced himself for the tide, but nothing reached him, no water lapped frigid around his ankles.
No, the tide was crackling as it rose. It was clicking, skittering, separating into individuals with edges raised to catch and cut the moonlight. There wasn’t a tide… it was crabs, hundreds of blue crabs scuttling out of the froth in a horde. The mass swarmed up the beach, coloring in the blank spaces and freezing Cal at the apex of his fatal march.
He ventured one foot over the crowd, searching around for an opening that could carry him through this obstacle, but the crustaceans were packed in from here to the water.
“Excuse me,” he tried to incline his voice down to the mob. “If I could just get past you…”
He flinched when the crab closest to him raised a single claw, that daggered shape echoing countless childhood scars, but the pincer didn’t cut him. The crabs, however, did not move at all, they remained firmly in his way.
The leading crab kept its pincer raised. He crouched down to look closer at this little creature demanding his attention. Face-to-face, the crustacean began shifting its complex mouth around, biting limbs moving with clear intent – let me speak.
“Fine,” he sighed. “I can’t really step over you all, let’s play this out.”
The vague, jittering movements of the crab’s triple jaws crunched and cracked as they came together. This mess of noise went on for thirty seconds or so before the delicate interplay of the crab’s jaws fell quiet and grabbed at nothing but the still night air. Although the sounds spat between them were nothing but animal groans, carrying no meaning besides the confusion they elicited in Cal, the crustacean poised itself thoughtfully, as though it was waiting for his response.
“I don’t really know a lot about crab behavior, so I couldn’t even guess what you’re all doing out here, but I’ll be gone soon,” he said, as politely as he could, waving at the crustacean like he might shoo away a fly, grimacing when they didn’t flinch. “Look, I’m sorry if I bothered you. Please just move.”
A great murmuring passed through the crabs before the leader raised both of its claws to call them to silence. Its whole body tilted upward when it did so, and he could spy the piercing tip of its apron; the spot where his fingers would clamber as a child to pry out the richness.
“I’m sorry, too, if I’ve ever eaten anyone you know,” he added. The crab didn’t notice, its arms already curling and pulling themselves around another garbled verse.
“Stop it!” he interrupted, kicking up a spray of sand that the crabs blinked through, unmoved. “I don’t know what this is, okay! I don’t want to but I will step on you if you don’t get out of my way. You can’t stop me or change my mind, you’re a crab!”
A sea of eyes as dark and potent as coal moments away from becoming diamond wiggled silently at him in agreement.
“GOD! All of this is so stupid,” Cal groaned, the blank eyes of this leading, accusing crab holding him with an unnerving depth of attention. “Can’t you just let me get it over with? Just get out of the way and let me leave. I’m ready, I decided, it’s over.”
He slumped backwards into exhaustion, the crabs shifting around to make way for his legs as they splayed out. The sand beneath him was damp, uncomfortable as it seeped into his shorts. He remembered cleaning sand off after days at the beach with his family, how rapidly the process could degenerate from inconvenience to desperation as the scrubbing went on and the grit remained stubborn and unreachable.
“Maybe I’m losing it, because now I’m thinking you would understand, actually. Crabs die, right? And it can’t always be okay, it can’t always be easy,” he voiced the thought to test how real it might become. “Death is so ordinary, even for you. It’s… fuck, it happens all the time, families fight, people leave and they don’t always come back, living kills everyone.”
Tears quivered behind eyes he’d spent months turning stony and lifeless.
“People say that like it makes losing someone easier,” Cal struggled through each word. “What does that actually change, though? I still didn’t want him to go. I don’t care that this happens all the time, or that other people know how it feels. He was my brother, he was the only person who understood me and I don’t know what to do without him.”
The crabs only stared while their little limbs twisted aimlessly around. Lifting his gaze, he tried to return himself to the killing moment that had brought him here. Anxious eyes traced the curve of the ocean, the undulations of the waves, the suggestion of breath latent to the tender movement. He imagined taking his last, drowning breaths in time with that ancient rhythm and frowned. The beat would never match, the ocean didn’t move like a dying man.
Cal slowed his breathing, trying to pull in the salty air and release it in time with the ocean. He was watching the far waves, the rising of deep water that danced to lunar music. Gradually, the in-out of his lungs found the rhythm those distant performers were following. The crabs sat with him in this silence they had grown slowly and now suddenly to share.
“I wish it’d been worse,” he admitted. “I wish it had been so bad I could just lose it and everyone would think… what else could he do? Maybe we could have fought or something else awful and then he'd have gone ahead and died.” That word came out stuttered and glottal. “But it was so dull. There were fights, of course, but I always thought, I always knew that he’d come home. That was a fact. Saying he’d be there when I needed him, it was like saying the sun would come up tomorrow. No question.”
The crabs raised their claws in recognition. Everywhere Cal looked were those white bellies and inset aprons.
“I want this, you know,” He had come here burning with suicidal desire, but the moment was flickering, turning dim and impotent the longer he was forced to sit in it. The ocean that he was supposed to drown himself in was gone, and the beach was flooded with all of these clawing, clattering things that refused to let him find it again. “Can’t you all just get out of the way, please?”
All of the deadly surety of his actions broke in one heart-rending collapse and the pain flooded into reality as tears. The weeping moved out of him like an ocean through the breaks of a dam, his quivering nose spewing bubbles of snot with each wretch and moan. His whole body became nothing but the vehicle for this grief, face buried deep in hands and everything contorting, struggling to disappear into its own shadows. The killing moment terrified him now; it burned in his stomach like he had tried to swallow embers. He wanted to sob until the very memory of it was drained from him, until he didn’t know anything at all about any brothers or any loss.
Crimson-tinged claws closed gently around his finger. Shaking, he matched tear-stained eyes with the crab’s midnight stare. The vacancy there was deep enough to hold him.
“It hurts too much, what am I supposed to do but this?”
The little crustacean urged him forward. He stumbled along in a low crouch, unwilling to part from his guide and their tender, daggered hand. Its kin split to ease their passage, pincers raised high toward the moon. Their clicking swelled into a great chorus as he drew close enough for the waves to toss a chill around his ankles.
Shivering slightly, he looked to find his guide and found nothing but the ocean. The waves were rising to his waist now, pulling at his shirt and splashing foam into his tangled hair. They would not hold him here, this was as far as he needed to go tonight.
Matching his breathing to the steady heartbeat of tide and moon, Cal wept out as much grief as he could summon into the ocean. It poured out in tears, in cries, in stories, in memories turned silver as they mixed in with the sea shimmering off starlight. He gave the best and worst of his brother to the water, everything they had ever meant to each other and everything that could’ve, should have been. The ocean received it all with raised claws, singing the infinite out of each moment, drawing the love from the grief and returning it to the world as the tender motion of waves breaking sweetly over sand.
Jack O'Grady is currently writing from Boston, but grew up writing from Maryland and graduated with a degree in Advertising & Public Relations from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since he began writing seriously, he's been focused on translating vulnerable experiences with nature and time into stories that strive to question our conception of either. His writing hopes to soften genre and structure into something like a soup, warm and nourishing. Outside of prose, he also writes tabletop games and runs games as often as everyone's schedules align (not often).