Victoria and the Crab

The summer Victoria Alloretti turned sixteen, she fell in love with an Alaskan King Crab. The crab’s name was Christopher, and he was not from Alaska, nor was he kingly in any way. He washed up on Second Beach a few days before the 4th of July and when Victoria saw him, she immediately felt a yearning that had never crossed her heart until that very moment. She had been walking the beach in search of shells that resembled the letters in her name, because she was working on an art project. Instead, she came across a crab who she was sure was her soulmate. When Christopher saw Victoria, he wanted to slice her in half and eat her, but the logistics proved impossible.

Victoria picked up Christopher and brought him to her sister’s engagement party. She introduced him as her new boyfriend, and all of her sister’s friends were brittle with jealousy, because they had all dreamt of one day dating a crab, but could never find one on the beach. Victoria’s sister, Lucy, lied unconvincingly when she told her baby sister that she found crustaceans to be thoroughly unattractive. Secretly, she knew she would fantasize about marrying Christopher instead of her fiance for the rest of her life. When Victoria left the party, her mother pulled her father aside and told him how relieved she was that Victoria had finally met such a nice partner. And what luck that he was a crab. Crabs were so hard to come by, and somehow, Victoria had found one.

She brought him back to her apartment on Fountain Street and placed him in her bathtub. She ran the water and scavenged for some salt in her cupboard. Kosher would have to do. Her ex-roommate had left behind a small amount of Himalayan sea salt, but she told herself she was saving that for a special occasion. She may want to make Christopher a nice dinner one day, and she’d want to have the nicest salt available when that time came. Christopher didn’t want to enjoy his time in the tub, but it was a calm improvement over the wide and wild sea. Before he washed up on the sand, he had been courting a stingray named Jessica. She rebuffed him, and a cold, somber ennui consumed him so intensely he prayed for a lobster trap to swim into. Instead, he’d been rescued by a human woman and attended some kind of function where every woman there whispered to him that he could come home with them if things didn’t work out with Victoria. He wanted to eat all of them, but his mouth was so tiny, and they were so large. Somewhere, Jessica was probably swimmingly freely and forgetting about the Alaskan King that would have made her his Queen. Life is an endeavor for the brave. Christopher clipped his claws together, and enjoyed the taste of salt.

At breakfast the next day, Victoria assured Christopher that there was nothing strange about their newfound love. It would remain chaste, because the spirit is the truest vessel for harmony and devotion. Victoria had read that on Tumblr when she was in her teens, and it had stuck to her heart like a sticker on the back of a notebook. Christopher chewed on a piece of scrambled egg. Victoria asked if he’d like to go to the aquarium, or if that would be too traumatic. He couldn’t speak, but she inferred that he’d like to see some of his brethren even if they were in tanks. She put a little bow on him after searching for it in the closet along with her other gift-wrapping essentials. Christopher couldn’t wait to urinate in her car, but Victoria drove a fifteen-year-old Sonata, so she wouldn’t even notice a small puddle dissolving into her passenger seat. She stopped at Carl’s Coffee and got Christopher a jelly donut. The woman working at the drive-thru noticed the crab and remembered a soft shell she had met in Bermuda when she was in college. The memory was so potent she had to take the rest of the day off.

At the aquarium, Victoria paid half price since Christopher was a crab, but when one of the curators suggested that her love would be more at home in their new exhibit, she nearly decked him. Over in the interactive section, a patch of coral reef had a starfish on it that looked delicious. Victoria sensed what Christoper was thinking, and she whispered to him that eating a starfish is bad luck. From the corner of his tiny eye, the crab could see a stingray swimming around behind blue and silver glass. For a moment, he thought it might be Jessica, but very rarely did coincidences happen in aquariums. They were places for reflection, not for surprise. Victoria showed Christopher the turtles, the jellyfish, and the elderly octopus. After that, it was time to go home. On the car ride back, she turned on the radio so that Christopher could hear Samara Joy singing “Lush Life.” Nothing about a crab’s life is lush, but Christopher appreciated the sound all the same.

That night before bed, Victoria stopped by the bathroom and ran her fingers along the surface of the bathwater. Christopher had already been asleep for several hours by then. Sometime in the next week or so, he would pass away, and Victoria would bury him under a sand castle on the same beach where she found him. She would never love anyone the way she had loved him, but she would adopt a baby squid for a short period of time in her late forties. Victoria would call herself a widow even though she and Christopher never married. What was a marriage anyway compared to the victory of discovering the perfect crab for you on an ordinary day in July?

Jessica did forget about Christopher, but every evening, as the moonlight made its way down into the more mysterious corners of the ocean, she would call up the memory of being loved in her mind. The unusual thing about being loved is that whether or not you remember the person who did the loving, you never forget the quality of the love itself.