That’s me on the concourse, between Piercing Pagoda and the kiosk that sells airbrushed t-shirts of Tweety Bird dressed as a mob boss. I sell hermit crabs. There’s the box, shipped here from a warehouse in New Jersey. Lined with cheesecloth, marked “Perishable,” and perforated with holes. Monday mornings I arrive to a chorus of claw clicks, like rocks rolling down a mountain made of keyboards.
We sell them for 99 cents each, but the real money is in the accessories—the plastic cages and plastic palm trees. Tubes of cholla driftwood and rainbow bags of gravel that look like candy quins. We stock extra shells since the crabs don’t like to remain in any single one for long. The best part of the job is the extra shells—the swirly jade turbos and polished whale eyes. I paint them in my free time. I know what to paint and when to maximize profits. Bright little suns at the beginning of spring, and snowflakes when winter rolls around. Sometimes kids from my high school walk up and ask what I’m painting. I show them—smiley faces, four-leaf clovers, Magic 8 balls—and they nod. They say, “Oh that’s interesting,” before jetting off again, laughing with their friends toward a different part of the mall. I watch them go until they fade into the crowd.
I once painted a shell with a heart so deformed that I crossed it out in black and flung it into the crab enclosure. When I turned around there she was, her left eye drooping like a sunflower in the hot August air. Scuttling toward me with the fat pink knuckles of her claws, assembled inside the shell I’d just thrown. Her body at home in the ugliness I’d created. She was my best friend instantly. I named her Henrietta.
Customers swelled like the tides. Parents sauntered up to me, massaging their kids’ shoulders. “You guys hiring?” they’d ask. I always smiled but not with teeth. Not with my “horse gums” as mother called them. Hundreds of people peered into the cage each day, and none of them wanted the hermit crab with a crossed out heart on its shell. Some even pointed and laughed. At the end of each day before I punched out, I’d detach Henrietta off the chicken wire cage and hide her in my pocket when no one was looking. Her antennas poked around in the confines of my loose jean shorts the entire way home, brushing up against my leg. Whether or not the antennas could wrap all the way around me didn’t matter—I knew it was her version of a hug. A real one. I smiled at everyone we passed on the sidewalk (not with teeth). They didn’t smile back but that wasn’t the point. I liked having an inside joke. I always knew I would. Henrietta liked it too, I think. And on the days when I could tell she was tired, we rode the bus home instead. I would hold her up to the window and let her watch the passing city scenes. I always wondered if she knew how fast she, a creature of her size and standing, was traveling. I wondered how fast I would need to travel to reach a proportional speed. Every so often a drunk man would stumble on at the corner of Main and Maple, sit beside me, and ask if he could fuck me. I’d gently pet the front of my shorts and think there, there.
Once home, we’d skip through the apartment hall right into my bedroom. Past the stained carpet and clothes piled up in the den, where mother sat rooted in a perpetual cloud of Newport smoke. She never said a word. Just waved her free, ginless hand into the light of the TV when I returned. If father said a word I couldn’t hear it—him being in some other den, drinking some other woman’s gin. In the safety of my room, I’d extract Henrietta from my pocket and place her on my bed. She liked to pinch the stitches of my comforter, pull the threads loose and raise them to her mouth. I had a corkboard where I’d meant to pin photos, but it made the perfect surface for her to scuttle around on. I drew crossed out hearts on the back of mother’s rent envelopes and taped them to my shirt. My thrifted transistor radio only picked up one music station, but we sang along with Mama Cass and The Beach Boys over and over while gossiping about the day’s customers. We decided whether they were mean or curious, or if it was just pleasant to have spoken with anyone at all. And when I heard mother’s footsteps, the music caught in my throat.
I once overheard, in the quickness of a food court lunch break, two small boys giggling about the sleepover they’d had the night before. How, under all those pillows and blankets, in the fort they built beneath the pullout couch, they agreed their hearts were both calm and racing at the same time. Every night when I heard the sound of mother’s crooked footfalls fading into nothing, after the cracked wooden floor of our apartment stopped creaking, I glimpsed at Henrietta and was certain I knew what they meant. Every night after the floor stopped creaking, our world remained.
***
The employees at Payless were tearing down beach signs and replacing them with back-to-school banners when the two young girls marched up to me. I was painting spirals around a channeled whelk. Their thin, wheat-crisp bodies were followed closely by someone who appeared to be one of their mothers—a light-haired woman made entirely of sharp edges. She was wearing a pantsuit and talking loudly on her cell phone. Before I could say hi to any of them, one of the girls blurted out to the other, “He thinks that just because he made varsity as a sophomore, he’s some big shot who can get any girl he wants now? Fine! See if I care!”
Her friend nodded, empowered.
“Hey lady,” the girl continued, this time looking straight at me. Her pearl-blue eyes were two jewels fixed beneath a shiny blonde bob. “If we buy a crab do we get a bottle of fish food included for free?”
“Sorry,” I said. “But everything is sold separately.” I don’t know why I apologized.
The girls took a long look around the enclosure, admiring the shells and my handiwork displayed on them. They gasped some “oohs” and “aahs.” They stuck their fingers between the wire squares of the cage, and before I could tell them not to do that, the blonde girl piped up again.
“Perfect!”
Her violet-colored index nail pointed straight to the top corner of the cage, right where I’d placed Henrietta.
The air blew out of my lungs. The girl was pointing and flashing a toothy grin, first at Henrietta, then at me, like she knew. Like this was someone else’s inside joke. Like she had an entire buffet of jokes to choose from before settling on this one, this one at my expense, knowing the look on my face would be worth it.
“Ew Chelsea,” her friend said, twirling a dark lock of hair around her index finger. “Pick one with a prettier shell at least.”
Chelsea sighed with her shoulders. “The shell’s the whole point, Britney. Look at the crossed out heart. This little guy doesn’t need any fakes who say they love him, and neither do I. We’ll be pals in no time!”
“Are you sure you don’t want to listen to your friend?” I said. I didn’t like Henrietta being referred to as “this little guy.” Would they change her name to something different? I couldn’t bear to think of it. The Henrietta I knew, gone forever. Her old life crossed out just like the heart on her back. Forced to live out the rest of her days as Derek, or Brian, or whatever horrible name these girls would inflict on her. The mother was still talking loudly on her cell phone, peering at me sideways. “She’s right, you know,” I continued. “There are prettier shells in here. Prettier crabs too.”
“I know,” Chelsea said. “But I want him.”
Henrietta was still clinging to the corner of the cage. She looked like a perfect fruit on an otherwise dead tree. I imagined plucking her off the piece of wood and her body blooming from the hole to see what was happening. I imagined her antennas slowly pittering against my wrist. She would feel the blood running underneath the terrain and know that it wouldn’t collapse beneath her. She would know she wasn’t alone. And I imagined dropping her in a barren cage and handing her over, watching as the space between us grew, her left eye drooping more than normal just so she could look back at me for longer.
I could feel tears forming in the bottom of my eyes, but I slipped on the vinyl handling glove anyway. I opened the door to the enclosure and pleaded with the girls one last time.
“Please?” I said. “Please?” They looked at each other, confused.
By now the mother understood what was happening. I watched as she hung up the phone and smiled sagely, like she was about to introduce stairs to a bunch of lemmings. She sashayed over in her pantsuit, her heels clicking on the mall’s marbled floor. Her hair looked like ten thousand harp strings glistening under the LED lights. She touched Chelsea on the back and waved me close. The plan that would save us all formed as a whisper just inside her lips. She looked at the girls, then at me, and leaned in.
“My daughter said she wants the crossed out heart.”
I realized then, as all three women stood there waiting for me to do my job, that I’d never been watched by that many people at the same time in my entire life. I’d always hoped, prayed, that if it ever happened, it would be for something good. Something I’d done to make myself or others proud. Now the chance had finally arrived.
I ripped off the glove and slammed it on the counter. Set a plastic cage beside it. I told them they could pick whichever goddamned hermit crab they wanted. Take twenty, I said. Take them all. I fled to the bathroom and cried in one of the stalls. A nasty chill invaded my body that drained the color from the cracked tile walls and pressed them into me until I was nothing but a wrinkle in vacuum-sealed air. I cleaned myself up and went back to the booth. Four quarters sat gleaming in a square on the counter. Henrietta was gone.
***
I tried to quit my job, but my mother wouldn’t let me. She said until school started again she didn’t really want to see me all that much, and she wasn’t going to pay for my books so I needed the money. I kept going to work but left small shreds of myself back in my room every day. My shell paintings dulled, my focus muddled. The crabs became hideous to me. I’d never before noticed how their twisted, membranous bodies appeared as fetuses spewing from toothless mouths. Most of my time was spent wondering how they could ever be loved. How anything could be. I also fantasized about the day I lost Henrietta. I dreamt of flashing my gums at Chelsea and her mom, swallowing them up in my desperation, then running away with Henrietta to some new life out at sea, surrounded by nothing but the type of solitude that used to hurt us. And yet part of me still believed. Part of me believed that while I was away from the counter on that day, crying in the bathroom stall, Henrietta sensed what was occurring and swapped her deformed heart shell out with a more unassuming one. Part of me still believed she was just waiting for me to look down and find her.
And then, on a day like any other, I spotted the drooping left eye. And below where it hung, the knuckles of her claws, fat and pink. Fat and pink and waving with forgiveness. Her mouth chewing an invisible comforter thread. I knew it was her, there in a different shell. One I painted at the start of summer. One dotted with dozens of stars. How relieved I was, how elated. I snatched her from the cage and held her to my chest, her feelers moving up and down on my shirt like two scissoring fingers. I wanted to slot her right through my skin and into my soul, like a written wish into the hollow of a tree. At the end of my shift I clocked out and hid her in my pocket, then we started walking back home like nothing had changed.
Clouds slipped in underneath the sun. I noticed Henrietta wasn’t brushing up against my shorts pocket like she used to. A cold breeze threatened the arrival of fall. I didn’t smile at anyone on the sidewalk, and they still didn’t smile back. If there was an inside joke I couldn’t remember it, or what it even felt like, or why I thought it had led me to this moment. All I could think about was lying in bed later that night, with Henrietta resting on the corkboard beside me. Hearing footsteps creaking along the floor, footsteps that grew louder and multiplied as they approached. The music stopped and my breath caught. The brass doorknob slowly tilted, its mechanism shifting open with a clink. My eyes adjusted to the darkness in the doorway, and I saw them standing there. Chelsea and her friend. Chelsea’s mom and mine looming behind them, each one staring back at me with hollowed out eyes. Each one illuminated by the same expression. “Well,” they said. “We’re waiting.”
I stopped amidst the moving crowd. People flowed around me like I was a root in a river, drowning on one end and gasping from the other. I fished Henrietta from my pocket and held her to my face. The left eye wasn’t drooping like it used to. Nothing was happening like it used to. Just cruel words and cruel faces and cruelty that whorled toward a single point.
I threw Henrietta as hard as I could against the side of a brick building. Her shell shattered on impact, the stars bursting like brilliant supernovas. Her limbs and flesh and eyes exploded into pink mist. No one turned a head in the whole gray city. No one looked down at the pieces. I could feel the tears coming again. A bus passed on the street but I was waiting for a bigger one. One as big as the sky. One that would go faster than light and take me somewhere beyond it.
Dan Shields has words in Cleaver, ANMLY, New Delta Review, and others. Find more of his work at https://danshields1.wordpress.com/ and say hi to him on Twitter @DanDotShields.
Photo by: Joel Ambass