Winter 2018 Kaplan Award Winner
On the passenger side next to me he’s thawing up from the ice in which he had been placed indefinitely. Like a patient coming back from anesthesia, I can see his delicate chest beating heavily — or whatever part of him I’ve anthropomorphised into a human organ. I imagine he’s scared, fragile, fighting for his life. I feel awful. For the first time in my twelve years as a vegetarian, I begin to feel that deep seated nausea of my own responsibility as a human. When people ask me if it bothers me to watch them eat meat or if I judge others who do so, I always shake my head wildly and say: “no, of course not. That’s their choice, just like not eating meat is mine.” But in that moment I understand, this is the cosmic unfairness of it all. Us, larger, intimidating humans, impeding on smaller creatures. The age old tale of it being our right to do so; our superiority to them. But clutching the steering wheel and swallowing through my constricted throat, I don’t feel so superior at all. What I really feel, is traumatized.
My leg is shaking in anxiety and I appear to lose cognition momentarily. The next thing I know I’m pulling up in my driveway, and I run up to my house, lobster wrapped carefully in newspaper, the greenish-brown crustacean perched in one arm like an infant, while I frantically jingle the multiple keys on my keychain looking for the right one. Finally, I find it, pushing the door open, all the while staring at a car advertisement in Spanish snuggling the lobster tightly in it’s newspaper blanket.
My mom is standing in the kitchen, and I stare at her unturned back for a while, panting heavily. She hears me and spins to face me.
“What’s the matter?”
I show her the contents of my catch: “I saw him at the market. They kept him there on ice. He was alive, just lying there in the middle of the market. I’m always talking about how much I want to help animals. So I’m keeping him, and saving him from being eaten,” I gesture towards him in my arm, smiling down at how peaceful he is — ignoring the fact that both claws have been bound, and he’s technically not yet fully lucid.
“Lobsters eat fish,” she sighs.
I blink at her a couple times. “What?”
“Lobsters eat fish. If you want to keep him you’re going to have to kill a lot more fish to maintain him than would have died if you had kept him at the market.”
All of a sudden I realize that I don’t know what I’m doing.
“Fuck.” I swear, the first time in years.
My mother walks over and gives me a bear hug. She kisses the back of my head and says: “take him back.”
I nod, but I don’t. Instead my next drive takes me to the shore. I pass a few busy piers until I find an empty one a little ways off. I can taste the salt, and I bet he can too. I smile widely. “To freedom,” I tell him dramatically, as though somehow this is a big moment for the both of us.
Carefully using the scissors my mother handed me on the way out, I unshackle his bound hands — an unjust sentence revoked. I hold his belly careful so as to not get caught in his fury of emotional turmoil, and am surprised at the lack of response and autonomy that comes from him. His free form resembles his bound one.
I kneel precariously at the edge of the last wooden plank. “I’ll miss you” I say, and toss him gently back out.
I watch him plop down towards the ocean floor anticlimactically. I look up like I’m on ‘The Office’ and someone just said something stupid. I never checked whether he was a freshwater or a saltwater lobster.
I don’t know if he’ll survive here either.