by Ethan Zaborowski
They had discerned a method of swimming past the cages long ago, but this season some entered them at will. Not one knew that the cages led to land, to the hands of men, to commerce, to the mouth—and besides, they figured without words, now was the moment to think a way out of the water.
It became a habit, once Eastern waters grew too warm for long life, of filling the gulf in myriad pods come August—most of them settling lower, snaring crabs and fish and wisely waiting to leave a place so man-polluted when the water permitted, others ventured too close to land, departing upward, snared, pincers pointing out in flaccid appeal. These were not to be helped, and the cages were not to be swam near, and this stiff maxim was to be understood until recently. Something ancient had begun to thaw, running down into their water, expanding it, boiling them insidiously and spurring them to land. Soon, the only place cool enough would be dry, and they’d need to make an upward plunge somehow. All of them.
…
Be studious, give little away, a handshake and five-dollar words and lowered eyes. Give nothing by means of body language w/r/t the stench. Unpack. Victor had been relocated to coastal Maine by his supervisors at FFS. Relocation was common to him, since the higher-ups at FFS encouraged associate data analysts to prioritize the bulk of the product over the quality of it. You’re payed to pencil in a steady influx of goods, he had been told, and if things get rotten/faulty/deficient on the processing end, our restaurants/grocers/patrons could very well blame anyone but us. They worked with fish, shellfish, and other things that decomposed at a rate faster than dry goods: Raw lobster, he reminded himself, spoils within 36 hours, while chicken and beef take days to spoil. For all they know, our product goes bad en route to the distributor.
Advice was given to him at several postings to ignore quality reports, to ignore processors who insisted on a stench or sickness, to ignore fishermen who insisted the product was bad when it came out of the water. Advice was given to him, in a word, to lie. And this morning, he thought on his way to FFS’ commercial building on the harbor—a meeting between himself, his manager, a single lobsterman, and data analyst from the FDA—he was there to lie about FFS’ relationship with the safety of the product and the safety of the provider. Never had fishermen of any sort been present in these meetings.
Perhaps lying wasn’t the word for what he was doing. Perhaps it would do the company good to get a feel for what the providers suffered. Surely, this relocation was high time for him to finally bridge the gap between the acquisition of the product and the appraisal of it. God knows his last venture in the Philippines failed to bridge this gap, left him aloof with his numbers while somewhere below the fishermen contracted myiasis of the mouth. He remembered the call he received—something resembling we’re going to have to close this location, Victor. This one girl’s upper lip is fucking bulging with larvae. He had very little to think about this. His job, he thought, concerned reporting the quantities of the goods, not worrying about the health of young women tasked with simply getting the goods. But surely these young women were also somehow FFS employees.
Maine wasn’t a big move, though, and Victor wouldn’t need to worry about the availability of the product this time—landings have rapidly and consistently increased in the area since 1980, and they brought in 132 million pounds of lobster just six years ago—so the window for disappointment would be narrow on his end. Forty years of significant boom and it would seem to follow that the fishermen were more than capable of doing their own job and accounting for their own safety.
No injuries on their end, no optics mess on FFS’, no too-soon relocation on mine, Victor prayed. His new apartment basically looked out over the Gulf of Maine, so reaching the harbor was no issue. Once there, he stood a minute staring while a fisherman, heavier and hairier than himself sat across from him, still in his waders. Then the FFS manager sat, then the FDA analyst, and all introduced themselves to each other while he sat, staring at the waders. Yellow pajamas, he thought. He had to remind himself that he was a father. Over seven relocations ago, he was winding her down for bed, her pajamas yellow and herself parroting the gait of a construction worker, beating a couch cushion with a plastic wrench. There you go. A little harder. That’s progress, he’d say. In subtle jokes he thought it good to engender in her a trust, a faith, in progress and industry. He’d watch over her math homework carefully, trade real dimes for plastic apples and applaud her for her budding salesmanship. This is how the world works. This is how you participate. This is how the gears turn and you turn them. This is how I teach you how.
“We manage 150 pounds per day,” the fisherman was speaking directly to Victor, but Victor hadn’t been listening. “Been rounding up to 200 lately.”
“That exceeds my estimate. My understanding was around 100,” Victor said.
“Yeah well, we’ve gotten more daily each month since September. Seems they’re all gathering themselves up just near where we lower the cages. Coming up with the things nearly full,” the fisherman said.
“I’ve heard that some of them have suffocated themselves packed into the cages. Others cracked their shells,” the FDA analyst said, pointing his pen at Victor. “Surely, you’ll have the processing team discard these when they come up.”
“I suppose I’ll have to inspect the um, yields some time,” Victor turned to the fisherman. “How long do you have before they migrate—December, I presume?”
“Well, December used to be end of season, but last year the crew would stay out there well into February. Water’s more fit for them here than anywhere South or East,” the FFS manager said.
“Water temperatures are going up—have been for a while,” the fisherman added. “You picked an opportune time to post up here. Biologists—the lobster kind—expect the boom to wear off in the next year or so. ‘Course to us a boom’s a boom—plenty of landing to be taken advantage of while it stays high. Then they’ll go somewhere North.”
“Unless they all come ashore. Some of them have already, I heard. A few stragglers,” the manager winked at the fisherman, “soon enough” he looked at Victor, “We’ll be chasing them, picking them off the ground.”
“Uh, surely,” Victor understood this as a joke, “when that day comes, we’ll be out there chasing them with you!”
They visited the harbor for an hour, where the FFS manager stood at a distance in rubber gloves, but the fisherman beckoned Victor over as he brought up a single cage, the first Victor had seen. It was true, he observed, that the things were bursting from the bars, all wriggling, pointing their claws uncannily forward to the shore, as if they meant to be caught. He recalled his daughter at the grocery store, seven relocations ago, but do their claws get crushed when the rubber bands press them shut? And do they ever get angry, having to lay on top of each other in that cluttered cage? He let her pick one out but didn’t tell her they’d have to kill and eat it. There were some bits of reality, the way things worked, that children found too brutal to take in baldly.
She’d learn, he was sure, that the cost of the comfortable living he gave her necessitated certain products suffering as they were processed, distributed. Certain people in certain positions, too, would put themselves at risk of illness and injury for her to have the things she needed. She would learn this reality just as he did, just as he went into business knowing this, knowing expansion, growth, despite the cares of hurdles, tools, human or planetary or otherwise. There are doers, he was taught, and there are Dreamers. No—Milkers. Doers and milkers, and the milkers keep reality on its track and moving at sickening mph. Sift out the bits of process that matter most and discard the rest. In the cage, one lobster ran over another, its legs clobbering the other’s eyes.
…
Pink, fleshy hands would break the surface each hour, and those of the pod having swam too zealously forward, would determine whether now was a time worth being caught. Others clung to a crag much deeper, feeling themselves slowly turn in hue. The astaxanthin was breaking out, live cooler proteins releasing it, and the sea likewise feeling bloodier where they settled, heating. Quit this place, bade something unseen, new to the habitat. But many of them remained set, stubborn. These had outlived men before, had made themselves present in the larger makeup of things, adapted to changes in heat and cold, cleanliness and the lack of it. Millenia ago, they made use of the sea’s floor when human waste began sinking, had managed to live off it when prey began to die; had made use of the men having died and sunk to the bottom; had adapted to the synthetic trash growing more abundant each year.
This change, though, seemed more rudely forced than the others. Those who hardened themselves against the change were dying, floating to the surface a steaming husk, curling in themselves in some pocket of territory. They had been wise, knew to leave, to shed, to feed when necessary, but they never grew intelligent. Thus, they developed little means of ascertaining which of their comrades were dead and which were simply still—a reality, which, when coupled with the scarcity of things to feed on, led them to take each other for food: first, the dead ones, and later, the still ones.
Some, in a primordially undergrown way, recognized this reality as a degrading one. Some had sucked calcium from the bones of wood-toothed sailors, some recounted the meat of ancient, bearded Greeks, others still experienced the crowning of the first human foot in water. Now they fled their homes, killed each other to stay alive. Far off, they knew, markers of time dated far before themselves were liquifying: locked monuments let out great wet sighs, shrinking. The old world was melting into a new one and the two, mixing, would bleed the Real out onto the land. Time’s boiling carcass would interrupt man’s comfort in expenditure, and their lives would be mere collateral, profoundly insignificant.
…
…it looks a little medieval and kinda cruel but it’s actually very fast and effective uhm…rather than throwing these guys into a pot of water. Two months in Maine, and Victor had counted four lobsters having somehow made their way into his little concrete yard. He wouldn’t eat them, but wanted to know where to put his foot into their heads so he could throw them away with minimal wriggling. You’re gonna put it right here, there’s a pointy spot right there, and you come down and you kind of cut his head in half. He supposed he wanted to kill them instantly, wasn’t exceptionally cruel, didn’t hate animals. But these were pests, products. He took a tally—which, to be sure, was never disappointing since his arrival—and began to worry about them breaking into his apartment. The fishermen made him aware of a surplus of the things: he had had to order them larger crates, spend more time counting the landings, and had lately decided to label some groups sea and others land, unaware if there was a difference in quality between the two.
He tried to research, watch the local news, understand why there were so many landings, but most of the lobster coverage was too broad for him. First a shot of fishermen and crates of product, then an obligatory warning that soon the gulf would heat too much to be sustainable, then the eschatology: polar bears on a small raft of ice, islands of trash in the Pacific, holes in the ozone layer (graphics held over from the late 80’s), the sky burning in Oregon. He would find himself feeling attacked by the end of these broadcasts—maybe that was the intended effect. Too weighty, he’d think, and not fair. He remembered what he was taught about the issue, put them into practice as best he could. Reduce your personal footprint. He did. Reduce your personal waste. He did this too. Didn’t generate much personal waste, didn’t make many personal choices once he got used to being alone. Understood the individual, the personal—both by way of choice and responsibility—all too well. His daughter was on fall break, and he was closer than her mom, so he’d be tasked soon with making Maine exciting to both of them.
She arrived as he was coming home from the harbor the next day. He met her in the parking lot and had devised no way to open the conversation. Couldn’t say she got so big, as fathers say, because she hadn’t. Couldn’t open with a joke, because the air seemed to hang heavy when they were together for the past two years.
“First story?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll show you the way. I’d hug you but, uh, there’s a stench.” Neither wanted to hug each other anyway.
“I thought you’d be in rubber gloves or something,” she said as he unlocked the door. “But I suppose you don’t go down and actually catch anything often.” This was pointed. But she was studying marketing just like he did.
“Nope, I don’t catch anything. I just make sure we’re sending things out in good condition.”
“And the fishermen?” She knew about FFS’ health and safety violations, blamed him for staying with the company.
“—know precisely what they’re doing. I’d simply get in the way, as I do. How’s school?” She didn’t answer, looked around the apartment. Looking for something to fight about w/r/t move, marriage, mom. Maybe just beat her to it.
“See anywhere hiring nearby? Or is your break too short to do any work?”
“I don’t know.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Am I supposed to foot rent for a month and a half or something?” Maybe don’t beat her to it next time. She made a show of tripping over some boxes. “Too busy to unpack?”
He, in turn, made a show of slumping down on the sofa and sighing hard. The line was a tough one to toe, he knew, because—optically—he wanted to have maintain dad-status, not just be out of the girl’s life. This was tough in practice, though. They didn’t like each other anymore since he wrecked things with his wife. She left, but he knew he hadn’t been present for many things. He cared, in truth, mostly and only for being a nonentity, something fluid and amoral and untied, focused on the best opportunity, skirting discomfort and the ugly things. Diapers and dogshit had bothered him twenty years ago, and the pangs of sustaining an adult who blamed him for a change in pace and parenting didn’t agree with him now. Growth, he seemed to have taught himself at some point, the accumulation of status and comforts and the promise of accumulating more. The steel-clad way. The way of the milker, the entrepreneur. I am an entrepreneur. These facts he cared for more than a wife and a child and the glassy edges of others. These facts were real and normative, promulgated through law and the market and time. Fatherhood was ephemeral, airy, undefined, and he had to be prepared to drop things that almost begged him to drop them. She outgrew her yellow pajamas within months, started counting her change wrong and didn’t want to play grocer.
“Jesus!”
“What?” Victor’s daughter was in the guestroom now, where most of the boxes were. He could tell as he ran to respond to her that she was genuinely startled, but she was accusing him of something still. There were two lobsters in the corner of the room, and she hugged the other corner. I’m uncleanly, she thinks.
“Yeah, they’re lobsters. You’re on the coast of Maine—they’ll find a way in sometimes.”
“In houses? Do you keep food in those boxes or something? Do they just come in here all the time?” Like I open the door and let them in, he thought.
“Not too often, but they’ve been landing in record pods since 2018. Like I said, they’ll find a way in.”
“That must be why you’re here all of a sudden,” she said.
“Why else would I be?” He brought his foot down on one of them. “I was assigned here. Would you rather I went to appraise something scarce? Be broke? I’m not the scum of the earth for simply doing a job where my work is needed. I haven’t hurt anyone.”
“No, but people do seem to get hurt where you go, the ones actually farming and fishing and butchering, and you seem to be just fine simply raking in the yields. People also get sick eating FFS-produced seafood all the time. It doesn’t take much sleuthing to be aware of that.”
“Welcome to reality. That’s my role in the distribution process. I didn’t earn a degree to wrangle animals like—”
“Like the fishermen you just visited today? Their necks on the line, right? Never yours. Reality.” She seemed to chew on the word, not knowing how to respond or turn it against him. His phone rang, he answered, so she sat staring at the two lobsters for a moment. “Are they bright red like this in the wild? I thought they only turned red when they were boiled.”
Victor threw his hand up at her, listening. Victor, we regret to inform you. All product from this week had to be recalled. Most lobsters were coming up dead in the cages, as in dead for a few days. They emit a toxin, turns out, when they decompose. Fishermen had been breathing it in. Two reports of numbness in the lips and tongue, vomiting and nausea and critical symptoms he forgot by the time he hung up. He’d be relocated. It’d look bad for the company, but he wouldn’t lose his job, and the move wouldn’t be tough. Don’t let yourself get used to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat.
He prepared to tell his daughter that she likely would have to leave by the end of the week, find somewhere else to stay over her break, but a kettle seemed to whiz in the room all of a sudden. A part of him hated to admit this, hated to admit to his daughter how often each post of his fell through. He was only a small part in the industry, of course, but having her here reminded him of how often she saw his upward stride failing. Still, too, if their relationship was ruined—if he had ruined it—he needed to demonstrate to her that he had engagements greater and more worthwhile than her and her mother. Sometimes, he thought, he wasn’t sure if he himself believed this to be true.
“Oh god, it’s screaming,” Victor’s daughter said, pointing down at the lobster he hadn’t squished yet. And it was doing just that, curling in on itself, red as the sun, letting out this horrible whistle that continued after he smashed its head with his foot.
…
For those opting to remain in the water, they found that closest to shore was the only viable place to remain, and this still began to heat and expand. Many of them stood now on the shells and arms of others being long dead, either of exposure or from the necessity of the stronger ones feeding. Those alive had acquired a new sense of emergency, unlike any previous fluctuation in surrounding or food or death. They had seen other things in crisis: oil erupting from the heart of the ground and flooding their biome black, great ships broken from the surface and reaching the floor in shreds of wood and flesh, great beasts impaled and brought upward despite their magnitude and protest. The impact now was terribly local, though. One day, the pod would be whole and silent, and the next a single member would venture too low and flail all ten legs as the heat melted them beneath their armor. Another would shed out of habit, slip from their husk, and dissolve exposed there in the water. All the roe now burst upon conception. The sea above them was clouded and strewn about it were their insides. Quit this place. Quit this place, bade the unseen thing, which they understood to be the new sea around them—which they understood to be permanent.
An actual emergency now, they understood. They thought not how their world was breaking but knew that times would confront themselves soon. Too much water—ancient, Northern—had broken through to the most recent pool. And the boiling beneath them, therefore, was the voice of ancient body resenting its new waking state. And the ancient body was a violent, indifferent one. When it heaved, it smothered entire systems of life. They were but a small annotation in the impact of its wrath, and their coming to land, likely dying there, was but a preordained step in the full crowning of the Real. It was decided, then, that they would break surface, and as they did, they were made aware that their bodies made a shrill ringing sound
…
She was leaving this morning, Victor remembered, so he would see her off as quietly as he could. With no fishermen at the harbor now, he had no reason to leave early anyway. He spent the past few weeks in bed, sedentary, waiting out his stay until the next assignment, which would be far from any coastal area. So he spent most of his time lying in bed, watching TV, kept the boxes packed and was careful not to get anything out that would be a pain to load up. His daughter wasn’t upset by the news, would stay with her mom until break was up. Good, he’d thought, it’s stable there, at least. But even this he wasn’t sure of.
He hadn’t thought of the goings-on of his former family at all, unless they made a point to interrupt his work somehow. Family was ephemeral, he remembered, and the sleek realism of the life he chose made him choose between his own upward mobility and the urge to teach his daughter the things he had learned. He made this choice when he veered away from her years ago, accepted relocations and accepted an analyst job with FFS, with much more risk. He admitted, wordlessly, then that the only thing he could teach her was to worry about herself, become the perfect and perfectly accountable actor reality required. It was nearing 11:45, and she was to leave at 12:00, so he got himself up. Don’t let yourself get used to anything, et cetera.
It was only once Victor got to his feet that he heard the noise. It was faint until he opened the door, much like cicadas or a distant train. When he passed into the kitchen, though, he noticed something like a tortured animal in the sound, and that it was much larger.
“Uh… Dad?” She was staring from the kitchen window, pale and confused, nothing pointed or combative in her voice. What she saw truly made her want her dad.
He looked out next to her. The shore was bleeding. The ground was blood red for yards, and it was screaming. No, he corrected himself, there are parts of it moving independently. Moving forward. Each part moved, running on many legs, toward land, each emitting a bloody whistle and brimming at the joints with what looked like steam.
He made for the door, planning to get in his car as quickly as possible. He undid the deadbolt, then turned back. My personal footprint. His daughter was still glued to the window, still staring out at them, unable to move. In the doorway, still. In yellow pajamas. He thought, but couldn’t think long, since the hissing was wrapping itself around the complex, tiny legs pattering against the walls like pebbles. He shook her.
“Jessica, I need you to listen to me. There’s an escape on the third story that’ll get us to the roof. They’ve gotten through to the first story before, but if we want to avoid them, we’ll have to go as high up from the ground-level as we can. I’ll lead you there, just go quickly.”
“But all your boxes, all your things—”
“My things don’t matter right now, just go.”
He threw the door opened and watched her blast up the stairs to the escape—his hand, he noticed, somehow on her shoulder without protest, guiding her.
…
They had broken through, ran forward blindly through the foreign, dry plain. They would die within days, be broken, stepped on, reacted to accordingly. But this would be brief. They would be forgotten, as bigger things reached the surface, as the ocean met the land—a frail vignette, steaming, bringing with them the bleeding edge of the Real.
About the Author
Ethan Zaborowski is a writer based in Toledo, Ohio. Having earned a BA in English from Bowling Green State University in 2022, he continues to strengthen his literary grasp through tutoring, freelance academic writing, and private scholarship. He has written extensively on novelists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, and his creative writing endeavors to couple modernist-inspired style with the uniquely disoriented emotional experience of the twenty-first century. Ethan’s previous work has appeared in The Esthetic Apostle, Prometheus Dreaming, and Tebok Kai.