-- "Findings," Harper’s Magazine, June 2009.
Her name was Sallie, and I met her on an outcropping on the Chesapeake near the crevice where my family used to take their summers. She was young, 19 molts or so, with blazing orange tips on her claws yet, and her shell – though soft and pliant and new – led one to imagine the rounded apron beneath. I worked up the nerve to send over some annelids on a clamshell, and when she raised her pinchers in a wave, I sidled over as fast as my ten legs could sidle. She placed her chelae in mine and we drifted left then right in a flirty tug-of-war.
I won’t say it was all oysters and clams – we were both cancers after all, and so maybe incompatible by fate. She thought I was cranky and bitter when the temperature shifted, and she could be cold and hard-shelled, but I honestly thought we had something that could last. I had planned to ask her to carry my sperm to the south end of the bay, where she'd keep it sacked through the warming waters before releasing her eggs that following November or December. I imagined our children making their way into the cold waters of the north, seeking out their father’s face among the busters along the coastline, and I’d recognize in them their mother’s softly smiling eyestalks.
And then one day, it happened. I had been out collecting seaweed and mollusks, and as I came up over the rocky rise, there she was heading steadily leftwards, buck and rider underneath some twerpy green-spotter from the shore. I never saw her again – maybe they ran off together, maybe they were wiped away in the undertow. That’s probably what they deserve. It took me a long time to get over that, seeing them together like that, with his seed all over her carapace. For a long time, I thought about just diving into one of those clay pots that litter the seabed, and letting them pull me up and away. I’m better these days and happily attached to a perfectly fine sook, but every now and again, when the winter turns towards spring and all the young men start releasing their pheromones, I think of her and the way she broke my soft-shell heart.
The Blue Crab
Her name was Sallie, and I met her on an outcropping on the Chesapeake near the crevice where my family used to take their summers. She was young, 19 molts or so, with blazing orange tips on her claws yet, and her shell – though soft and pliant and new – led one to imagine the rounded apron beneath. I worked up the nerve to send over some annelids on a clamshell, and when she raised her pinchers in a wave, I sidled over as fast as my ten legs could sidle. She placed her chelae in mine and we drifted left then right in a flirty tug-of-war.
I won’t say it was all oysters and clams – we were both cancers after all, and so maybe incompatible by fate. She thought I was cranky and bitter when the temperature shifted, and she could be cold and hard-shelled, but I honestly thought we had something that could last. I had planned to ask her to carry my sperm to the south end of the bay, where she'd keep it sacked through the warming waters before releasing her eggs that following November or December. I imagined our children making their way into the cold waters of the north, seeking out their father’s face among the busters along the coastline, and I’d recognize in them their mother’s softly smiling eyestalks.And then one day, it happened. I had been out collecting seaweed and mollusks, and as I came up over the rocky rise, there she was heading steadily leftwards, buck and rider underneath some twerpy green-spotter from the shore. I never saw her again – maybe they ran off together, maybe they were wiped away in the undertow. That’s probably what they deserve. It took me a long time to get over that, seeing them together like that, with his seed all over her carapace. For a long time, I thought about just diving into one of those clay pots that litter the seabed, and letting them pull me up and away. I’m better these days and happily attached to a perfectly fine sook, but every now and again, when the winter turns towards spring and all the young men start releasing their pheromones, I think of her and the way she broke my soft-shell heart.
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1 comment:
the only line that jars is ' that's probably what they deserve' is it the ran off or wiped away assuming the latter but then why the probably? otherwise italo calvino is a fav and this made me smile thxs
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