I have a minor in geology and always had a soft spot for trilobites. I wrote this story for a contest a few years ago.
The Next Big 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.
riscilla 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.
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
A reporter and photographer from the Cape Courier
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 deal with it.
