by Maggie Hart

 

At low tide, the water pulls back and leaves everything splayed out and exposed, kelp ropes sprawled like intestines, fish bones, pearly insides of shattered shells, a film of rot that smells like pennies and iodine. Nothing stays buried. Something is always dying or molting or being transformed. 

This is when Hermit Crab comes out. Hermit Crab carries a spiral shell like a turret. Underneath, the animal is soft, the abdomen has no plating or armor, just a long, pale coil of tissue, curved like grub, the color of wet dough. 

Hermit Crab scavenges empty snail shells, leftovers from other lives. A dead whelk. A moon snail. Whatever remains intact enough to hold a body. The shells smell of decay, like the animal that rotted out of it. Sometimes a thin lining of old flesh clings inside, dried to paper. 

I watch Hermit Crab emerge from its shell: legs splayed, naked, faintly pulsing. It looks like something skinned. The abdomen unfurls and contracts without bones, a damp, granular underside. Sand sticks immediately. Grains embed. The flesh dimples where it meets the ground. Above us, the gulls take notice. 

The beach is strewn with abandoned houses. Stacks of shells like discarded cups, some cracked, some patched with barnacles, some drilled through by other mouths. A few carry hitchhikers—anemones, tube worms, small parasites crusted along the spiral. Nothing here is truly empty. Everything is already being used by something else. 

Hermit Crab approaches a shell in a hurry to cover the softest parts, that tender meat. He grips the rim and backs in. Turn, lift, test. If the opening is too narrow, the lip scrapes Hermit Crab raw. If it’s too large, the shell drags and pulls Hermit Crab off balance. A poor fit means slower movement, easier predation, unnecessary effort. It’s mechanics; stay alive or don’t. Hermit Crab tries several shells in a row. In, out. In, out. Each time, that brief, indecent exposure. All that pale tissue blinking in the light.

Nearby, several crabs gather around a single larger shell. They arrange themselves by size, smallest to largest, each one touching the next with the tips of their legs. A vacancy chain. When the biggest crab moves, they all abandon their shells, the sand littered with empty spirals and soft undersides. Hermit Crab is unchained, seeking a new shell alone. 

The tide comes back. Water fills the depressions in the sand. Tracks dissolve. 

Hermit Crab, at last in a shell that fits, wades forward and lets the water take its weight, until it is gone, until the hermit crab is only another moving lump among stones and foam. Only the unwanted shells remain, shaped for a life that has already outgrown them. Then, the sea returns, lifts them, and pulls them under. I stand there longer than I mean to, watching the water work, as if I, too, might step out of this version of myself and leave it on the sand, let the tide carry it away.

 

Maggie Hart is a writer, traveler, and leukemia survivor from Colorado. She’s currently pursuing a PhD in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at the University of Minnesota, where she also teaches undergraduate writing courses. Her work has been published in Off Assignment, Narratively, Gordon Square Review, Journal of Narrative Medicine, Mud Season Review, and The Audacity among others.