ST1.2 | "Crabby Feelings"

PROMPT: Ah, February means love is in the air! The birds are singing, green is coming back to the plants, and we’ve let love into our fragile, beating hearts. Now all we can do is hope…hope that it stays very, very still and resists tearing free of our chests and casting our love to the still-frozen earth…

CRABBY FEELINGS

by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier

We all take the creed before we get to the pet shop: our bond with our human, our one, comes first. Dogs do it. Cats, too—although much more reluctantly. And yes, even us hermit crabs. You might not be able to tell, but curled up deep in our shells or hidden in our terrarium sand, the truth of that creed courses through our claws and our hairy little legs. That bond is everything. That bond is life.

My Julie made it easy to keep. I knew she was the one the moment she walked into the shop. It had been four weeks of snot-nosed kids glancing at my glass cage and then tearing off toward the puppy section, four weeks of adults who tapped the glass once or twice and then meandered to the fish tanks. Julie was the one who stayed. She was short and slim, with warm brown skin; box braids with a hint of blue plaited into them. She leaned in. Looked into my eyes. Nodded.

“Think I’ll call you Shellby,” she’d said. Her voice sounded like a day at the beach. Shellby. I liked that. I think she knew. She took me away that day. Took me home.

A home in a home in a home. My shell, my decked-out terrarium; our cozy townhouse. Julie played calypso music and read her poems out loud to me. She laughed when I climbed on the mesh cage she bought, and put me on her hand, knowing I’d never pinch her. We were happy.

Or so I thought.

I didn’t mind Brett at first. He and Julie met playing baseball together in something called an adult rec league. He made her laugh with ridiculous jokes and tried to dance to her music, even though his moves were all wrong. Brett had wrinkled his nose through his catcher’s mask the first time Julie showed me to him.

“Kinda puny,” he’d said dismissively.

“Oh, come on, Brett. It’s not about size, it’s about heart,” Julie responded. And she believed that. We both did.

It was different after he moved in. He and Julie didn’t laugh as much as before. There were arguments that I could never see from my terrarium in the living room but were loud enough for me to hear across the house. Sometimes, Julie cried. She stopped playing music. Her poems lost their hopefulness and light. After a while, she stopped reading them to me altogether.

The biggest change, though, was Claws. I don’t know what possessed Brett to forgo flowers or chocolate after one of their big fights and bring home another hermit crab as reconciliation instead.

“We all need someone,” he’d said as he dumped Claws onto my sand. “Even your little crab in there, wasting away by itself. Loneliness kills, Julie. You need me here. I need to be here with you. You understand.”

“Brett, I don’t think we need—” Julie had tried, but he’d cut her off.

“Look, I’m not going anywhere,” he’d told her. I remember the words sounding a lot more threatening than reassuring, but I don’t remember exactly what Julie said to them. I was too busy eyeing Claws. This wasn’t going to work.

Hey, I get it—maybe you’ve never spent time with hermit crabs before. Maybe you don’t know we have actual personalities, just like people do. Claws was big and bombastic. He didn’t talk much, but oh, he made his feelings very clear. He barreled over me for food and took up so much space in my Krabby Hut that I could no longer fit inside. He spent the entire day relaxing in my dipping pool, and if I got there first, he’d threaten me.

“Rip,” he’d growl. Claws could only manage one word at a time, but I knew what he meant. A big crab like him could pull me right out of my shell and dismember me in seconds if he wanted to. I gave him my pool and my hut and spent my days curled up in a corner of the cage, wishing he would leave. Wishing they both would.

The day it happened, the fight had been particularly bad. I was the only one around to hear it—Claws, blessedly, had muttered “Molting” to me, and pulled himself out of his shell. He burrowed down in the terrarium sand to shed his exoskeleton, ready to grow even larger. I’d been reacquainting myself with the dipping pool when I heard Julie cry out from the bedroom. A few seconds later, Brett stormed out of the front door with his baseball bag, yelling something about not blaming him—how this was all her fault; how she’d made him do it.

It seemed like an eternity before she wandered out into the living room to sob on the couch. I scuttled from the pool to get a closer look, and that’s when I saw it. The cut on her lip. The bruise on her cheek. The emptiness in her eyes. Something began to burn inside of me. I think—you know, I think it was that creed. And I knew exactly what I needed to do.

It was easy to find Claws. He was still sleeping. Still without his shell. Still completely vulnerable. I never could’ve done it, attacked and pulled him apart like that, if he were awake. If he’d had that protective shell around him. I did feel a pang of remorse as I hauled one of his pincers back to the surface—Claws was, of course, one of my kind—but this was for Julie. If Claws had taken that creed, he would’ve understood.

I scuttled to the corner of the terrarium and knocked the glass a little bit. It was enough to get her attention. She walked over and leaned in, the way she used to.

“Where’s Claws? Oh—Shellby, what happened?” She scooped me up in one hand and pulled up the pieces of Claws with the other. There was a pause. Maybe it was a few seconds, maybe it was longer. “Did you do this?” She looked into my eyes. I looked back into hers, telling her what I’d done. And after a few, she nodded. She understood.

I knew she did. I watched her look it up online. Sometimes crabs attack others when they’re out of their protective shell and molting, but sometimes, the molting process just goes badly and the crab dies. Sometimes, it’s an accident. It’s impossible to tell the difference.

The police certainly couldn’t, in Brett’s case. He’d been taking off his catcher’s gear in the doorway in the dark, and he’d just gotten his helmet off when he’d been whacked in the skull with a metal bat. The cops understood—Julie thought she’d been defending herself from an intruder. There were news stories and a trial, just as a formality; but things have settled down now. The house is filled with calypso music again, and Julie reads me her poems while I soak in the dipping pool. They call us ‘hermit’ crabs, sure, but I agree with Brett on one thing—we all do need someone.

I’ve got Julie. Our bond is life.

Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier lives in Apex, NC. Originally from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, she is an emerging writer of contemporary Caribbean mysteries. The winner of the North Carolina Writers Network’s 2022 Jacobs/Jones Award for Black writers, Ashley-Ruth’s stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, and The Caribbean Writer. Ashley-Ruth is a first-grade teacher and mom of 4, so writing time is more valuable than gold in her house.