The Crabs Are Small

The first thing you need to understand is that vampire crabs are small.

Not small compared to an alligator. Small compared to a biscuit. Their whole bodies fit on a silver dollar, legs included. You could hide one beneath your tongue if you didn’t mind the legs.

I told you that already.

You haven’t written it down.

That worries me.

June said they came from islands on the other side of the world, where the air was wet enough to drink and the ground never learned the difference between land and water. She kept twelve of them in a glass paludarium beside the dry-storage shelves at Low Water.

Purple shells. Yellow eyes. Little cream-colored claws.

Beautiful things, really.

People hear vampire crab and imagine blood. June always corrected them. They were scavengers, omnivores. They ate fruit, insects, dead fish—anything soft enough to pull apart.

That distinction mattered to June.

Dead things, she said.

Never living things.

Low Water stood on pilings where the county road gave up and the swamp began. The dining room leaned east. The kitchen leaned west. Put a marble on the floor and it rolled directly into the grease trap.

The building had been sinking for forty-one years, but the tourists liked that. They called it rustic. They took photographs of the cypress roots breaking through the deck and asked whether the dark water under their tables contained alligators.

It did.

We just didn’t advertise it.

I started cooking there when I was nineteen. June’s father owned the place then. When he died, June inherited half and sold the other half to me for one dollar because the bank wouldn’t lend money against a building actively returning to the earth.

June studied wetlands. She understood rot professionally.

I understood it differently.

Rot could be trimmed. Mold could be bleached. Sour stock could be boiled hard and served with enough vinegar. A soft tomato could still become sauce.

June believed that once something began dying, you let it die.

Three weeks before the storm, she brought me the engineer’s report.

She placed it on my cutting board during lunch service, right between six snapper fillets and a hotel pan of remoulade.

STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND, it said.

The words were printed in red, as though the paper itself had been injured.

“We’re closing,” June said.

“We close at nine.”

“Cal.”

“I have thirty-two covers coming.”

“The west pilings are splitting. The walk-in floor is separating from the foundation.”

“The floor’s been separating since Easter.”

“Last Easter or the one before?”

That was June’s idea of humor.

She wanted to close Low Water, collect whatever insurance remained, and donate the property to the state. Let the swamp take it back.

She had already signed the first page.

I should have known then that something had begun replacing her.

The storm arrived on a Tuesday, although by midnight there was no Tuesday anymore. No road. No parking lot. No clean edge between the river and the sky.

Rain struck the metal roof like handfuls of thrown rice. The swamp rose around the pilings, black and shining. Frogs clung to the kitchen windows. Something large bumped beneath the dining-room floor and made the chairs tremble.

June and I stayed to run the pumps.

At 11:17, the power failed.

The exhaust hood died. The walk-in stopped humming. Every machine in the kitchen went silent at once.

If you have never stood inside a dead kitchen, you wouldn’t understand. Kitchens are supposed to breathe. Fans pull. Compressors pulse. Pilot lights whisper. Without those sounds, Low Water became a body holding its breath.

Then something cracked in dry storage.

June found the paludarium split from one corner to the other. Muddy water poured through the shelving. Moss, bark and purple bodies spilled across the tile.

She dropped to her knees.

“Help me find them.”

Water was entering beneath the back door. The floor drains had begun spitting up things that looked like coffee grounds but moved when the flashlight touched them.

“We have a building coming apart,” I said.

“They aren’t native, Cal. If they reach the swamp—”

“They’ll drown?”

“They’re crabs.”

“Then they’ll be delighted.”

She didn’t laugh.

That was the second sign.

June caught five before the emergency lights flickered out. She put them in a stockpot with a lid weighted by a can of tomato paste.

The remaining seven disappeared.

At 12:06, the western pump failed.

June pulled on her raincoat and said she was going outside to reset it.

I told her not to.

She went anyway.

She was gone twenty-three minutes.

You’ll hear people say twenty-three minutes isn’t long enough to call someone missing. Those people have never watched a swamp swallow a flashlight.

I stood beneath the back awning calling her name. Rain filled my mouth. The dock ended three feet beyond the door, though I knew there should have been twelve more feet of it. Palmettos bent nearly flat in the wind.

Something pale moved between the cypress trunks.

It was too low to be June.

It crossed the water on four limbs.

Then the generator coughed, the floodlights flashed, and nothing was there.

When June returned, she was barefoot.

Her hair hung over her face. Mud covered her raincoat to the shoulders. Blood ran from one nostril and made a black line across her mouth.

A vampire crab clung to her collar.

She plucked it off and held it toward me.

“Six,” she said.

Not I found one.

Not Cal, I’m hurt.

Six.

As if she had counted herself among them.

She said her boots had been pulled off in the mud. She said she had struck her face against the pump housing. She said the pale thing I saw had probably been a raccoon.

June was a poor liar. The woman wearing her knew the shape of lying but not its weight.

I tested her.

That is what you do when a supplier brings you fish that smells questionable. You press the flesh. You inspect the eyes. You ask when it was caught, then ask again differently.

I poured her coffee.

“One sugar?” I asked.

“Black,” she said. “You know I stopped using sugar.”

June had stopped using sugar in May because her doctor frightened her about diabetes.

A perfect factual answer.

The wrong answer.

People are not facts. June complained about sugar, tore open the packet, poured it in and complained again. Every morning for eleven years.

I asked what we served the night Low Water opened.

“Catfish,” she said.

“Frog legs.”

“Cal, there’s a photograph above the office door. The sign says CATFISH—SOLD OUT.”

The thing had prepared.

It knew where we kept our memories.

Behind her, reflected in the dark window, a man stood holding a meat tenderizer.

I turned.

Nobody was there.

When I looked back, the reflection was only mine.

June watched me carefully.

That almost convinced me. June had watched me that way before—when I worked doubles, when invoices piled up, when I tasted sauces that weren’t on the stove.

She reached for my wrist.

“Your hand is bleeding.”

There was a crescent-shaped cut below my thumb. I didn’t remember getting it.

A purple crab sat in the floor drain between us, working something red between its claws.

June whispered, “Seven.”

Then she told me she was closing the restaurant immediately.

Not after the storm.

Not after we repaired the floor.

Immediately.

She pulled the engineer’s report from inside her raincoat. It was dry. Twenty-three minutes in a hurricane, and the paper was dry.

“I put it in a freezer bag,” she said.

The imitation always had an answer.

She said the building was making me sick. Mold, carbon monoxide, exhaustion. She said I hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time in weeks. She said I had been speaking to customers after everyone had gone home.

Then she made her mistake.

She said, “There’s nothing left here worth saving.”

I don’t remember picking up the tenderizer.

I remember her raising the phone.

I remember the bright crack when it struck the tile.

I remember June slipping—or lunging—and putting her hand through the broken paludarium.

Afterward, there was blood everywhere.

Scalp wounds are supposed to bleed badly. Hand wounds too. That’s what people say.

But this blood moved.

Thin red streams crept between the tiles toward the floor drains. The crabs emerged one by one from beneath the shelving.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

They approached June without fear.

I had to know what they recognized.

You understand that, don’t you?

You can’t cook safely by instinct alone. You test the center. A roast can be brown outside and raw against the bone. That is why we have thermometers. That is why we have knives.

I made the imitation comfortable.

Butcher’s twine is designed to hold flesh without tearing it. I tied her wrists to the chair arms and wrapped folded towels underneath. I secured her ankles with plastic wrap because it stretches before it cuts.

She fought hard.

June would have understood I was trying not to damage her body before I could inspect it.

The imitation screamed until I packed a clean side towel between its teeth.

You still haven’t written anything down.

But I suppose you can’t.

Your hands are tied.

There. That expression. June made that same expression whenever she thought she had caught me making a mistake.

I admit the finger was excessive.

At first.

The left little finger serves no essential culinary function. I sterilized the boning knife. I made one clean cut through the joint, exactly as I was taught with chicken wings. The thing fainted before I finished.

The crabs gathered beneath the chair.

I placed the finger on the overturned lid of the stockpot.

Eleven crabs climbed onto it.

They opened the flesh delicately. Almost politely. Tiny claws carried pieces of it into tiny mouths. One crab entered through the wound at the knuckle and disappeared up to its yellow eyes.

They knew her flavor.

When the imitation woke, it looked at the stockpot lid and made a sound I had never heard from a human being.

That sound nearly fooled me.

The storm has moved north now. I can tell because the water beneath the dining room has gone still. The kitchen smells like bleach, propane and wet earth.

Low Water is quiet again.

On the prep table I have arranged everything I need: boning knife, poultry shears, oyster blade, thermometer, clean towels and two deep hotel pans.

Mise en place.

Everything in its place.

I don’t need to kill you. If June is still somewhere inside, I may be able to remove you without hurting her.

I’ll begin beneath the sternum. The oyster knife will open anything hiding behind the ribs. If the crabs have made a nest around the heart, I’ll use the shears.

Please stop shaking.

You asked what happened to Dr. June Voss.

Now you know.

I pull the towel from your mouth.

You cough until blood threads from your lips. Your voice, when it comes, is torn and small.

“Cal.”

The thing knows my name.

“Please,” you say. “I’m June.”

I place the thermometer beneath your tongue.

“June never came back from the swamp.”

“I never went into the swamp.” Your teeth chatter against the metal probe. “I reset the pump. You were standing there when I came back. You hit me before I reached the door.”

“That isn’t what happened.”

“You carried me inside.”

“No.”

“You broke the tank.”

“No.”

“You kept saying I couldn’t close your kitchen.”

“Our kitchen.”

“Cal, look at my hand.”

“I have.”

“Look at what you did.”

“Quiet.”

Something shifts beneath your tongue.

You freeze.

At first, I think you are choking on the thermometer. Then your jaw stretches open.

A cream-colored claw hooks over your lower teeth.

A tiny purple crab pulls itself from beneath your tongue, wet and glistening, and raises its yellow eyes toward me.

No larger than a silver dollar.

I told you they were small.