Crab Deliverance

On Petco dot com you can set up recurring delivery of hermit crabs to your home, and you can also set up recurring delivery of hermit crabs to other people’s homes, it does not matter if you live there or even know the person, the hermit crab purveyors will not check and the residents of the home you choose will have no recourse to stop the hermit crabs arriving at their house just as often as you please, and you will walk by twice a week with your dog and at first nothing will appear to be any different, crabs are after all a gradual process, but as the months pass you will witness the crabs reaching the age of their maturity and the hapless reluctant parents walking them – verily they shall walk the crabs, O in strollers and on leashes they shall walk them, for it will not have been clear to them which seemed more suitable – the crabs will not be able to speak don’t be ridiculous but they will be able to sing, and in your dingy living room four blocks away you will hear the singing of the crabs and you will not be able to escape or suppress it through earplugs headphones or moving blankets, nay nothing will baffle or delay the grief song of the waylaid crabs growing into their unknowable adulthood without the guide of parents like themselves, grown into distorted crabs with human habits unable to return to the crab-homes of their birth and you will have done this you will have been the one who did this, their health will start to fail oh it will happen faster than you can imagine and by now their parents such as they were are long since dead and you are close behind them and the desperate ancient outraged futile love song of the crabs will find you always and shame you, show you up as what you always were, which is a trickster and false deliverer of crabs, and as your life contracts to a bed and a ratty blanket and then to even less than that the death song of the crabs will encircle and amaze you, it will pummel you and it will rinse you clean, it will bring you face to face at last with what you deserve.

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Evander Lang is a writer and filmmaker in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Le Danse Macabre, Willows Wept Review, and others, and his screenplays have placed in contests by Fresh Voices, Screencraft, PAGE International, and more. Andy Cohen is a cherished personal friend of his (Cohen once made eye contact with him and smiled). His complete work can be found at evanderlang.com.