Crayfish House by Cameron Pierce
Crayfish House
About ten years ago, while sorting through the basement after our mother’s funeral, my brother and I discovered a leather-latched chest. In the chest, we found a dollhouse. Our mother had spoken of this dollhouse on many occasions. The man who was our father – dead before we came around – had given it to her in place of a wedding ring. She spoke of the dollhouse as if it were long lost, a plastic bucket carried away by the tide, but here it was.
She said that when she first opened the tiny front door of the dollhouse, a snapping claw greeted her. A family of crayfish lived inside the dollhouse. There was a father, a mother, and two twin crayfish brothers. Our father had purchased them at a bait shop. The man who owned the shop was an expert in crayfish mating. He determined their sex for my father, who wanted the little family in the dollhouse to mirror his own.
On the day our father failed to come home from the mines, the father crayfish fell off the dollhouse’s second floor balcony and cracked his shell. Our mother buried him in the garden beneath the shade of a thorny blackberry bush. Very late that night, she received news of her husband. There had been an accident. His death did not change the fact that she was pregnant with twins. She contemplated suicide up until the day of our birth.
We removed the dollhouse from the chest. My brother ran a handkerchief along the roof, erasing the dust of twenty years.
“What do you think are the odds those crayfish still live in there?” I asked him.
“She made them up. No crayfish ever lived in any dollhouse.”
“The dollhouse is real, though.”
“So what?”
He reached for the pinhead-sized doorknob. The door creaked on hinges that would’ve required a microscope to see.
From the darkness, two red claws greeted us.
Several minutes passed before we determined that the crayfish was dead, but by then we were both crying, embracing like brothers for the first time since I fell off my bicycle in the third grade.
Through my tears, I could just make out the claw marks on the inside of the door. The crayfish had died clawing at the door, desperate to escape the house.
In an upstairs bedroom, we discovered two more crayfish skeletons, smaller than the one downstairs. They lay side by side in matching beds, yellowed sheets pulled up to hide their ribbed bellies. These must have been the brothers. This was how our other halves ended up.
In the doorway, then, the mother crayfish started moving. My brother quickly slammed the tiny door shut and returned the dollhouse to the chest. He fled up the rickety basement stairs. Startled past reason, I followed. My brother made me promise to never speak of this incident again. “Any mention of crayfish or dollhouses,” he said, “and I’ll not have you as a brother.”
Like a coward, I obeyed.
We let the bank handle the sale of our mother’s home and never set foot in there again.
* * *
Cameron Pierce is the author of Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, The Pickled Apocalypse of Pancake Island, and other books. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Barcelona Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Verbicide, Everyday Genius, Kill Author, Avant-Garde for the New Millennium, and many other publications.
Cameron also runs Lazy Fascist Press.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, dog, cat, and triops.