Apparently random lobsters are showing up on sidewalks on both the East and West Coasts. The last time that happened, I wrote this story,
The Next Best Thing.
Priscilla Newnam had seen some peculiar things in her 87 years, but she had never seen anything like the bug that crawled across her spotless kitchen floor one sunny July morning as she was eating her oatmeal. For one thing it was huge, at least a foot long, maybe more. And it was strange in a disturbing way. It looked like what you’d get if you mated a roachy bug to a lobster. She decided it probably was some kind of mutated crustacean that had somehow crawled up from the harbor and found its way into her house. And now she was going to have to deal with it before she’d had a chance to finish her coffee.
There wasn’t much that Priscilla Newnam was afraid of but the sight of the creature scuttling across her kitchen linoleum was…unsettling. Priscilla’s husband Tom had been a lobster man, and once or twice he’d brought home some strange things he’d found in his pots. There’d been a yellow lobster once, a freakish thing that he’d sold to the owner of a clam bar in Massachusetts who wanted to keep it in a tank to attract customers.
A reporter and photographer from the Cape Courier had come up to the house to interview Tom about the one-of-a kind find. The photographer, a young fellow named Julien Thibidoux, had take Tom’s picture holding the yellow lobster up by one claw. Then Julien had taken a picture of Tom and Priscilla just because he wanted to and sent it to them later. That had been thoughtful of him, Priscilla thought. She still had the picture on her bedside table.
As she watched the thing move from one end of the kitchen to the other, Priscilla decided that she was going to play the “age card” and turn the problem over to someone else. She hardly ever did that because she didn’t want people to start thinking of her as an old biddy, someone who’d outlived her usefulness. But just this once, she decided she would call animal control and let them handle it.
When she described what the thing looked like, the dispatcher sounded skeptical but said she would send someone out right away. Because Priscilla had a young voice, the girl on the phone didn’t dilly-dally around asking her foolish questions like, “Are you sure that there’s really a foot-long bug on your floor? Priscilla hated people who assumed that because you were no longer young, you were somehow stupid. She’d been a math teacher until she was 65 and she could still do long division in her head.
The animal control officer they sent was a young man, just out of college from the look of him and he took one look at the thing on her floor and said “Fuck me.” And he didn’t apologize for the profanity in that falsely smarmy way so many people did when they were talking to old people. As if they’d never heard a bit of salty language. Priscilla liked him for that.
“You ever see anything like this before?” she asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, surprising her, “I have.” He excused himself and went back to his truck and when he came back, he had a little collapsible trap with some kind of stinking bait in it.
“What are you going to do with it?” she asked him.
He didn’t look up as he answered, his attention focused on coaxing the thing into the trap. “Gonna ship it to the university. Marine biology professor up there is paying $100 for specimens. He says they’re showing up all over.” It belatedly occurred to the exterminator that Priscilla might claim ownership of the bug so he added, “I’ll split it with you.”
She waved away the offer. She knew young people always needed money and Tom had left her comfortable. “No, just ask him to email me when he knows what it is,” she said.
“Email?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before.
