How to Catch a Crab

While his sister flew a kite in the sunshine, skipping across the park’s green grass, Jason hunted a crab down in the dark rocks by the water.

With careful limbs Jason slowly descended the rocks. He kept his eyes on his prey. The tiny crab was motionless in the middle of one glistening slab just inside the spray of waves.

“You don’t know how to swim!” Jason’s mother called from a distant picnic table.

The young boy ignored her.

The dark, jagged rocks had been dumped at the harbor’s edge. They protected the grassy park from the eternal ocean. Traps containing rat poison had been placed among the rocks.

Above the churning water the rocks capped a labyrinth. From spaces beneath the rocks an odor of death rose. From small caves the crabs crept, moving slowly upon glistening slime near the restless water, feeding, extending strange claws.

Jason kept his eye on the tiny crab. Working his way even closer to the water, the boy placed his left foot on an edge of wet rock. A few missteps had already soaked his shoes.

Hardly daring to breathe, eyes down, Jason regarded the creature minutely.

How strange it appeared.

The crab, with its raised claws, seemed ancient. It resembled a mythical monster he’d seen in a picture book. A miniature monster, unconquerable, upon a mountain.

The crab’s body, its face-like shell, its bent spider legs and claws–formed a mask–from a lurking dream. It was a thing sensed in a nightmare. A shape. A shiver.

The jagged shape was that abomination penned as a warning at the borders of old maps. The shape was a nightmare upon which voyaging ships were wrecked.

Jason bent his knees, leaned slowly over, reached out his hand, keeping balance on the slippery rock as the crash of a small wave tickled his fingers.

The crab skittered into a space between rocks.

Jason leaned even lower.

The odor was repulsive.

He peered into the watery space. Possibly, possibly, the grinning mask lay within simple reach.

Unseen hungry claws waited inside that well of swirling blackness. A fatal Charybdis, squatting in her cave. Motionless and waiting.

The boy reached in.

“I caught it! I caught it” he shouted, lifting an arm high in triumph.

The tiny crab clung to the young boy’s finger.