Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s “Strayed Crab.”

I’ve been thinking about crabs. I’ve been watching my pet crab Herbert in his little tank, specifically designed to his comfort. There is a sandy area above the water that slopes gently into a watery playground, complete with real flora. It’s all for him.

Lying in bed, looking at my pasty, soft body, I’m thinking about how we all evolve into crabs. Carcinization. Other organisms with a non-crab form have been evolving into having crab-like forms. It’s happening on a pretty small scale now, but who knows? Something about the form—the flat carapace, that methodical distribution of legs—something about it is an evolutionary acme. I wonder if Herbert knows he’s already reached peak condition, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be something he’d need to think about, much in the way God doesn’t think about what it takes to become a god. He just is. You go, Herbert.

But there seems to be a class difference, even in crabs. I hesitate to place my limited, human understanding onto a different species, but I can’t help but sympathize for the crabs in the dingy restaurant tanks. Sometimes they’re just in a Styrofoam box, stacked up on top of each other, their legs scraping the tops of each other’s shells as each tries to escape. Their claws, of course, are bound together with zip ties. As a child I wondered why they wouldn’t just work together to get outclimb on top of each other like a pyramid of cheerleaders, send one crab out to get help for the rest. I know now that they’re aware that there’s probably nothing out there for them—they put their olfactory glands up to the sky and no longer smell the sea. The living’s in the trying, so they make sure not to succeed.

I saw on the internet that people have been rescuing crabs. They buy the crab from the restaurant, uncuff it and let it out into the ocean. I wonder about that. Is it the same, afterwards? Does the scraping sound of scratching shells keep them up at night, gasping under ghostly bodies? I’m sure they’d get over it, though. Crabs are hardy creatures. They do what it takes to survive. I wonder if wild crabs feel a sense of superiority over the ones in captivity, like Herbert here. I’m certain they would—there’s an undeniable nobility in freedom, even if that means having to fight for every meal. I once saw a video of a crab catching a swimming fish in its claws. A sliver of silver, a flash of movement, bam! The crab is flailing its catch like a kid that won a prize from a fair. I don’t think Herbert could do that for the life of him.      

Crabs aren’t even bound by the body of water they’re in. A particularly determined crab could travel the world, that’s what I think. But what do I know? The world is full of potential threats, and crabs can’t even look at where they’re headed when they’re walking. I stepped on a snail once—it sounded like the breaking of a ceramic plate; not shattering, but a slow grind. I wonder what stepping on a crab would feel like. There’s a chance that the shoe would slip right off the crab and it would scurry away harrowed but unharmed, but there might just be someone heavy-footed, someone in a rush, or someone vindictive enough to exert sufficient pressure upon the crab’s exoskeleton. Crunch. The skull would cave right in, probably. Right through the suit of armor, designed to protect from any sort of bludgeoning. Like an act of God. Of course, who could blame the murderer? Likely, they’d just been walking along rather nicely, and a crab scuttles along right under their foot. I don’t think they’d even dispose of the corpse properly. The crab’s to blame, after all, for wanting something more.

What do you do all day, Herbert, now that Mum’s gone? I feel like since we started spending this much time together, you’re starting to look unfamiliar, sort of the way saying a word too much makes it seem strange, like an arbitrary assortment of mouth-sounds. We’ve never spent this much time together—it used to be that I would glance at him twice a day, for breakfast and for dinner. Herbert doesn’t do very much at all, it seems. His mouth is twitching. I haven’t fed him in a while. It looks like his mouth is twitching the same way mine is, like he’s also saying a word again and again until it loses meaning. I wonder if he’d be calling my name, but that’s not much like him. It seems a lot more likely that he’s just hungry. Yeah, that’s it, he’s recalling his favorite taste, like when you move the back of your tongue around to get a final lingering snippet of that wonderful thing you’ve just swallowed. He’s reliving a taste, or a memory of one. Now I’m doing that too. Two idiots, deathly hungry, tongues twitching, recalling the most wonderful meal we’ve had in our lives.

The taste that I trawl from the back of my throat is briny and sweet.

I grew up eating crabs. The crabs were the easiest. All you have to do is have a little cage with some bait on the seafloor, leave it for a couple hours—when you pull it up, it’ll be swarming with crabs. Crabs will eat damn near anything. They aren’t picky. My dad told me there’s really only one thing that doesn’t work as bait—other crabs. Everyone else I knew seemed to concur, so this adage burned itself into my memory, a weird maxim to live by. Crab shalt not eat crab. How unexpectedly civil, I thought. This turned out to be untrue when later, I was put in charge of the crab cages. I pulled a cage too early, with only two crabs in it. Cursing, I looked away for a moment, only to find the larger one pulling the smaller apart, devouring it limb by limb. That crab committed the cardinal sin. It felt like there was something special about him, this tiny little Judas, so I waited for him to finish and took him home, put him in a tank, and named him Herbert. 

Eating crabs is an acquired skill. You have to be careful not to cut or poke yourself with the variety of spikes on their shells. First, you rip off the flap on the underbelly, called the apron, through which you can determine the sex of the crab. The rounder ones are female, and the ones with pointy aprons, like Herbert, are male. After that you get your fingers around the back of the crab, where you can see what looks like a seam holding the crown, the top half of the shell, to the body. If you pull, the crown comes off entirely, often with the brains and all, leaving vulnerable flesh. From there, gripping the legs as handles, you can snap the body in half and chow down. The meat itself is hidden in numerous, disorganized chambers, as though the internal structure of a crab was designed to confuse the crab’s own flesh. Afterwards you can crack the legs open one by one to get the meat inside.

Before I cracked one open it was a complete mystery to me what crabs were like on the inside. What does a crab look like without its shell? A snail without a shell is just a slug. A turtle is fused to its shell—the shell of a turtle is more of a ribcage than anything. More closely related to the crab is the prawn, which is really just one big hunk of flesh with the shell taken off, almost as if the shell was nothing but a jacket to remove. Peeling prawns is easy. Crabs, however, are difficult to visualize without their shells.

The idea of the crab is inseparable from the idea of the crab’s shell. It is the husk that gives it form. You can almost imagine that the flesh of the crab—no, the very soul of the crab is liquid, a living force indistinguishable from any other, before it is poured into the shell of a crab, and it becomes. The white flesh runs through the grooves of its new container, assuming form and life. No other creature is, in my mind, so purely defined by their form.

Isn’t that right, Herbert? You’re whatever you have to be. You’re a vulture in a gilded cage, that lovable toddler that crucifies squirrels in the backyard in his free time. Even now he’s flailing those killer claws around, as though waving for my attention. I want to know what you’re like under there.

I’ve peeled my shell off, molted, and I’m not sure I like what I see underneath. I get frustrated at my inhibitions and I want to tear them away. I do not want everything to be so heavy. I’ve come to realize that perhaps inhibition is my true nature, that perhaps instead of being a free and vibrant child that has learned the shackles of adult reality, I was born a coward, that I am representative of that human instinct to withdraw, to reconsider, of stasis. I keep digging and digging and all I can find is formless fear.

Oh, Herbert. What will happen to you when I’m gone? You would starve. You’re starving now. You would die on the inside first. Your shell would still be there, holding you upright, so that anyone looking would know exactly what you were in life. Would you rot? The ants would probably go in from the eyes, the mouth, and eat through the chambers of your flesh until you’re hollowed out. Can your shell be broken down by time? It must be so; but it can feel eternal as it cradles your rotting, fading flesh.

I am holding on to my flesh, gripping my bones, wishing they were on the outside. When I ripped off my shell there wasn’t a shiny new one inside waiting for me, all that’s left is raw, painful flesh, and it hurts to live, Mom. I am all soft and naked and true on the inside. There is a dead husk on the floor that used to house me. Molting is an agonizing process for crabs—when they’re done they’re weak, they’ve used up just about all their energy in the process, so they eat their shells for sustenance. They gnaw on their old bodies to fuel the growth of the next. I can’t. Whatever I do, I can’t bring myself to charge headlong towards my problems. I just shuffle around them, left and right, unable to look away. I admire compression, lightness and agility, all rare in this loose world. I want to live as though the world is against me, but somehow I can’t help but blame myself for the things that happen in it. I am so small.

I look up to Herbert, really. The job’s already all the way done, but I can’t live with myself like this. I keep calling for her, and the word still tastes like blood in my mouth. I am trawling through my throat to recall a fading corpse. I’m guilty. I’ve got to die, of course, I deserve it, but I haven’t got the courage, even for that.

Ace Chu is a university student from Singapore. He is passionate about good prose, TTRPGs, and animals. Despite being a city boy, he is a committed advocate of local fauna, not excluding frogs, snakes, pigeons, rats, bugs and pests alike. Drop him an email at thisisacechu@gmail.com!