Two Stories

Horseshoe Crab

“Oh, it’s a whole vibe!” said the server.

She was explaining to us the chocolate lava brownie, which was one of the dessert options that was part of the weeknight prix fixe menu. And I believed her. Or, I believed she was experiencing a whole vibe, and that the brownie itself had a better vibe. It was a Tuesday night and a large group had come into the restaurant, which the restaurant staff probably had not been expecting. The group had been happy to be split up into multiple tables. And just two servers for the whole space. We were not part of the group. We were tucked sort of into a corner, actually, away from everyone else. 

We’d already been sharing with one another: once we finally got our food, I’d dropped my fork onto the floor. Immediately, right when I went to pick it up to finally eat my chicken piccata. And we were so hungry, because we’d been at the beach all day, our usual little late summer vacation that we love so much, just us and the beach and our books, and then the restaurant had gotten slammed just as we were walking in, the big group entering just behind us, and so the wait for the food had gone on so long. I’d dropped my fork on the floor and we’d tried multiple times to signal to the server, and I kept trying to tell my partner, please go ahead and start eating, and eventually my partner took a bite but then had handed his fork to me after that first bite. And then I’d taken a bite and handed it back to him. And then he took a bite and then handed the fork back to me. And we went on like that, with no one even noticing, until both our plates were empty. And the fork had some of the branzino on it and some chicken piccata too, probably messing up the flavors of each, but mainly we were hungry and I was so glad my partner shared his fork with me. Like that story you get as a kid, about heaven—the forks are for some reason too long to use, they’re like eight-foot forks or something in heaven, but it’s okay; everyone just feeds one another across the giant dining table. And it turns out hell is exactly the same setup, but because it’s full of evil people no one feeds each other, and it’s more a torture kind of scene at the giant dining table, if you’re in hell. 

So my partner and I are already in heaven I guess, thinking about this chocolate lava brownie. We confirm that we want the chocolate lava brownie; we want the whole vibe. I had tried to save a horseshoe crab earlier, since it was stuck turned over on its back and just barely out of the reach of the surf. I had been afraid to touch it; I’d instead tried to gently turn it over with two sticks, just as the surf was coming. And it kept not getting enough water to get pulled properly back into the sound and just washing right up again, already flipped back over, and moving its legs in distress. I looked up horseshoe crabs on my phone, right then, waiting for the chocolate lava brownie, and realized I’d made it harder for the horseshoe crab: they swim upside down. Or what looks like upside down to me. Mostly they crawl in the sand, but when they swim, they flip over, legs up, and paddle.  

They have, I read to my partner, brilliant blue-colored blood that is used for medical research.

Across the room, the people from the big group were still eating. They had eaten slower than we had. They each had their own normally-sized fork carrying food to their very own mouth. I wanted to make a metaphor. I wanted to tell my partner the metaphor, but I asked, instead, if he was angry with me. 

“Why would you think that?” he said. 

I loved when we did this. 

Watching TV

When I watch TV or a movie, I’ve always liked to see characters on shows who are also watching TV or a movie. If it’s TV, most of the time the characters are supposed to be sort of zoned out—the TV-watching means they’re not being thoughtful or really interacting; they’re a bit mindless. If it’s a movie, we’re often looking at teenagers in the past on a night out, for instance. Maybe they’re watching something scary. They’re probably on a date. Sometimes there are images of families gathered around a TV together, which I like alright too. What I like the most is the least common depiction: someone really enjoying watching TV and just having a great fucking time watching it, alone or with others, like in that episode of Freaks and Geeks where Martin Starr’s character loves to watch Dallas, for instance.

And this has always been the case, just one little bit of life that I take slightly more pleasure in than most people. But usually just by a hair, like when you have a favorite food. I guess I hadn’t had that much chilled, relaxed family TV time, really. And then it became an actual real-life part of life, something that was just happening ambiently, all the time. I rented a duplex with two of my friends, and we got a really over-the-top cable package for the first time for all of us, so, already, lots more TV than I was used to. And our duplex became kind of the hang-out spot. We watched America’s Next Top Model and Wife Swap and also stuff we liked more earnestly—The Sopranos and also a video cassette someone had given us with all the Twin Peaks episodes on it.

We had a big brown couch that we’d gotten for free from a friend who was moving and also an ugly maroon papasan chair, also gotten for free, and then some various extra pillows for the floor. So we could get like ten people in there, all watching something. And I liked it: I liked being the people all sitting around a TV watching it, laughing, having a good time. I liked it even more when the TV had a TV on it, which happened often enough in Twin Peaks or Sopranos.

Sometimes there was some sort of late-night call-in show, where you could rank the dancing of different people who were on the show. Sort of like a game show but with a call-in apparatus. I thought, sometimes, of an old professor I had had who had fallen prey to a run-of-the-mill internet scam before people knew to be wary of those. Not something like the Nigerian prince scam, but the original Nigerian prince scam itself. And he’d sent large amounts of money to a random bank account. Another professor, a German professor whose English was heavily accented, had had his identity stolen around the same time, and he tried to explain it to our class. No one knew what he meant by “identity stolen,” and it was hard with the accent, and we all thought at first that he was having a sort of breakdown. Anyway, I don’t think this dance show was a scam, but it did involve paying to vote for something by entering your credit card number into your phone, and so we never actually called in. Even though we were always drinking or just feeling jubilant even without drinking, and so we always wanted to. We were cautious. The pleasure we were in felt tenuous.

Our landlord was a very granola sort of person, and one of the stipulations of the lease was that we would not only recycle but also compost and put our composting out in a compost bin maintained by the older tenants who lived in the other half of the duplex. We could see this compost bin from our couch, since the den looked onto a back porch with a sliding glass door. We could see the yard; we could sometimes see a possum scooting around. We were nervous about being good tenants, so we followed the compost rule—but we also followed it badly, and peach pits and kale stems and all sorts of other garbage rotted in a small trash can for many days each week until one of us remembered to take the compost out to the bin. Sometimes it took us longer than that and then all of us would get self-conscious about not doing things properly. Now I’d probably just put everything in a bag in the freezer. But at the time we cooked big, slightly incompetent group dinners and then let things rot while we watched all our shows in the next room, laughing at the TV, faces presumably lit by the screen in a sweet little tableau of twenty-something college town life. It was so good. The best thing is actually to zone out; it would be a mistake to want much else from life.

We watched TV that whole spring. A lot of reality TV. A lot of meals, really; we were trying to become better cooks and making slow but steady progress.

One night, in August, we were watching TV, most of us a little stoned, and someone got up to go to the bathroom and so turned the hall light on just as I was gazing up at the stippled popcorn ceiling. The ceiling seemed to be moving as I was looking at it. This seemed worrying, not for the ceiling, but maybe I’d gotten too high.

“The ceiling looks fucked up?” I said to my one roommate. He looked up at the ceiling too.

“I think it’s moving,” he said.

His boyfriend, who was there at the house nearly as much as we were, looked up at it. His boyfriend wasn’t high at all. He got up and turned all the overhead lights on. And the ceiling was still moving, moving—little crawling worms, worms that, with a little delay, I realized must be connected to the grain moths that we had had recently, which we had attributed to the composting problem. Bits of dust and wings in some of our dry goods, and we’d looked this problem up online and then had had to throw everything out. And now we had little white worms that were barely discernible against the white stippling, and there seemed to be hundreds of them, crawling around and making the ceiling look like it was moving.

Once we had investigated the kitchen, which was adjacent and also had the stippled ceiling, and readied ourselves, we got a broom and a mop and thrust their handles upward, smashing and then shielding ourselves from the falling larvae bodies and the bits of drywall dust that would fall, then thrusting upward again. We did it over and over, taking turns, though it would’ve made more sense just to wait and ask the landlord for an exterminator. I think we must have been scared we’d be charged by the landlord, since none of us even suggested it. Or ashamed, maybe, and so we made a game of it. 

We did a check in the morning and killed a few that remained. The next week we hosted for the Sopranos finale. We had the same experience as everyone else in the country: at the end, when the episode blips to snow to indicate Tony’s death, or rather the narrative just falling out because the protagonist is gone, we thought that our specific TV was messed up. Everyone shrieked. My roommate was fiddling with the cable box. I looked up in the middle of the chaos and more of the little white larvae were up there on the ceiling, crawling around. Ruining our little fantasy of domestic life but clearly gunning hard for something of their own. You don’t get an ending, the show was saying; what you get is that the narrative just ends, the transmission stops. The larvae were, I bet, perceiving us in whatever way larvae perceive things, watching us watch TV, thinking their thoughts, looking so frenetic, a sort of wiggly fuzziness around the stippling until they were killed.

∩

Marie Buck is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Spoilers, a collaboration with Matthew Walker (Golias Books, 2024), Unsolved Mysteries (Roof Books, 2020), and Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul (Roof Books, 2017). Her poetry, fiction, and scholarly writing have appeared or are forthcoming in Post45, the Brooklyn Rail, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Peatsmoke, and the Hythe, among others. She grew up in upstate South Carolina, earned an MFA in poetry writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently edits and teaches in New York.