“The Immortality of The Crab”

“The deepest problem:

of the immortality of the crab,

is that a soul it has,

a little soul in fact …

That if the crab dies

entirely in its totality

with it we all die

for all of eternity.”

Miguel De Unamuno

He worked as a line cook, made $13 an hour, and lived in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world that crackles in blueness, where Friday and Saturday nights meant cooking over 500 dinners. He had burns all over his hands, he called them badges of working in the culinary. industry for almost thirty years.

. Every night he came home tired and drank wine straight from the bottle. His entire body ached. When he got home he’d drink in bed and dissolve into drunkenness before passing out with a bottle still on his chest.

Sometimes he brought home carrot soup from the restaurant he worked at. I would eat the soup alone. With each spoonful I would think about the music of the carrots: They came from garden dark soil, a bit hard as it needs to be for growing carrots. I imagined the green hair of the carrots screaming as it pushed through the earth, and hands pulling them up. Sometimes I imagined the carrots ending up in a bucket with other carrots, and traveling to the kitchen of the restaurant where he worked. I imagined him washing the carrots, twice, before boiling them into softness which he’d mash into a soft paste that he mixed with cream. I imagined him standing over over the soup, his beautiful brown hands covered in shiny burns. I imagined his hands as he poured the carrot paste and cream into pot and set it to a boil, and let it bubble.

“So, what do you think of the soup?” He would always ask.

“It’s good,” I would say.

Sometimes, when there was nothing else to talk about, he would share with me how often he thought about the immortality of the crab: How when he worked on the wharf he had a routine of waiting for a white seafood delivery truck to bring in the catch of the day, and emptying white buckets of the scraps of what was no longer fresh. The vegetables and meats he saved for the compost, but the seafood. he could not resist tossing to his bewhiskered friends under the wharf who clapped and arfed. An old sea-lion with giant drooping whiskers and slightly mangy fur always came first for the scraps.

Some weeks were harder than others, like when crawfish were the catch of the day, and try to claw their way out of a boiling pot, or the time his restaurant’s glue trap in caught a mouse.

“He’s not dead, yet. I’d set him free, but, he’ll never live,” he told me. “I haven’t looked yet today. If he’s not dead, I’ll take the end of a broom and give him mercy.”

It was that way with him, always that way with him, whenever he worked, wherever he worked, he always thought about the immortality of the crab.