The Lobster

A lobster: red, unflinching, wet.

He was watching television when it happened and disinclined to consider it as it then presented itself, which is to say, real—he’d been binging a special on hammerhead sharks, the seafloor awash with gracious, godless beings, and had been drinking. His girlfriend had dumped him an hour prior, presenting substance abuse and ineffective communication as her chief complaints; he’d been smoking as well. Mere moments before the lobster’s appearance, he’d beheld the structure upon which it now stood, stoically, not as a table but driftwood, or a raft, kept somehow afloat in the increasingly improbable ocean of his living room. But then he turned off the television, and there was the crustacean, and he stared in disbelief. 

The shock abated; he eyed the lobster.

“Hello,” it said.


“Hello,” he replied.


“They call me Langostius.” 

“Steven.”


“I know.”


Then, a lull. The raft-driftwood-table was damp.


Steven sipped his beer. Langostius flailed.


“I’m going to ask a question, and I mean no offense by it: what are you?”


Langostius winced as if stabbed, then diverted his gaze.


“You don’t remember.” He sighed knowingly, as if expecting this. “We met months ago, in the market off La Cienega. Larry’s Loving Lobsters. You came in alone and started speaking.”

Larry’s Loving Lobsters: suddenly Steven remembered. Not the details—he had been high— but the fact of having gone there.


“Your speech didn’t seem directed at any particular audience, and the words came effusively, as though they might collapse if not baked in the heat of your breath. It took a moment to realize that you were addressing me. You noticed the splash of blue on my carapace and told me not to question myself, for the universe was within me.” 

Steven closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. He remembered more. He had consumed psilocybin mushrooms that day, having forgotten it was he and his now-ex-girlfriend’s two-year anniversary. She’d been furious, and in an effort to avoid a negative headspace he’d absconded to Larry’s Loving Lobsters. His mother had taken him there as a child once, after he and his entire kindergarten class had been made to witness their teacher boil a lobster, whom she had introduced as Gaston and who they had wrongly suspected was their new class pet, alive. He’d gone home dismayed, until his mother convinced him that all lobsters went to heaven and had taken him to Larry’s as a way of reinforcing this. Since her death, he sometimes returned as a way of honoring her. Incidentally, he found lobsters way cooler on drugs. 

By the time Steven returned to the present, Langostius had shifted from his spot on the table and was perched on the couch cushion beside him. Their eyes met. 

“You told me you loved me, Steven.”


He gulped; he’d had lobster bisque two nights prior.


I’m a monster, he thought, awash with guilt but unable to articulate it. 

Langostius tilted his head as if in understanding, inching closer to Steven as he did. “I know that humans make mistakes. They are born, they make mistakes, and then they die. Not so different from lobsters, really.” 

Steven blinked. He was drunk. 

Langostius continued: “What compelled me to come here tonight—to you, Steven—is just that. Death, a condition as lobster as human.” Here, he paused. “You understand what I’m saying, do you not?” Steven shrugged; Langostius finished, “It’s my time; I’m dying, Steven.” 

The weight of this disclosure hung between them, as if the air had thickened to gravy and he were a biscuit, absorbing it. Steven could think of no appropriate response; the lobster condition was unbeknownst to him. But if he had learned anything from his ex-girlfriend, it was this: there was always occasion for intimacy. All the regret in the world meant nothing if he did nothing to convey it. 

But emotional intimacy was not Steven’s forte, and so he did the first thing to occur to him, which was extend his right thumb and index finger and stroke Langostius along his abdomen, tentatively, and then, as the crustacean succumbed to his tender touch, with gusto, until he snapped his claws: he had finished. 

“Oh, Steven.” Langostius’s voice was suddenly songlike. “How pleased I am, to have offered you this chance at redemption—and to have witnessed you rise to the occasion! I must admit to having my doubts, but you have laid all apprehension to rest and proven yourself to be a man of your word. I know it now and shall never question it: you love me after all.” 

“Langostius . . . I think you have the wrong idea.” 

The lobster considered him, then laughed. “How your wit enchants me! The wrong idea—preposterous! How could I, when all my life I have guarded my virtue, to bestow it unto my beloved?” 

“You’re a virgin?”


“Of course! Are you not?”


“I am,” he lied.


“Then what, pray tell, is this idea you accuse me of wrongfully possessing?”


Steven inhaled deeply and exhaled. “You’re great, Langostius, but I just got out of a relationship . . . and I’m not really looking for anything right now.”

The lobster was crestfallen.


“I’m sorry,” he said.


“Sorry!” echoed Langostius, and scoffed. 

“I wish I had told you, before—” 

“Before you led me to believe you reciprocated my affections and robbed me of my innocence?” 

“Yes . . . before that.” 

Side-by-side on the soggy sofa sat man and lobster—who, despite their propinquity, were worlds apart. 

“I need a moment,” Langostius said, finally.


“Of course.”


Steven retreated to the bathroom, where he avoided his reflection as he washed his hands. He lingered a few moments longer, bracing himself for the tension and trying to formulate an apology that addressed the severity of the offense, but when he reemerged, he discovered that Langostius was no longer on the couch; he had migrated back to the table and was perched beside two bottles of beer, newly opened. 

“A truce,” said Langostius, before he could say anything.


Steven felt the anxiety leave his body instantaneously.


“A truce,” he echoed, and nodded.


Langostius nudged one of the bottles toward him, and he accepted it.

“Cheers,” they said, almost in unison. 

Steven took a sip, and then another. The beer was bitterer than he recalled and not especially appetizing, but drinking it was something to do, and a Langostius-sanctioned something at that, and so he sipped and sipped until the bottle was empty. Then he set it back on the table, next to Langostius’s untouched bottle. 

“Aren’t you gonna drink yours?” he asked.


“Lobsters don’t drink!” he replied, as if this were self-evident.


“Oh . . . may I?”


“By all means.”


He took up the second bottle and downed it as quickly as the first.


Steven blinked. He was very drunk.


Langostius was looking at him. “Everything alright, Steven?”


“Yeah, I just . . . drank too fast.”


“Ah—perhaps you should fetch some water!”


Steven made to rise again, but on standing, he felt dizzy and unwell. He faltered, groping the arm of the couch.

“I can’t . . .” 

He sank back into the sofa, defeated; sobriety and faculties had forsaken him. His substance use had never before yielded this outcome: he had been transported to lands unimaginable, cradled in the arms of God, imbued with the light and love of all that is good and pure—but he’d never felt this, this emptiness, a sensation of sinking so deep into his body he feared he would never get out. 

“Can’t move, can you?” he heard, echoing from somewhere outside himself. “Well, now that I seem to have your attention, let us return to our earlier topic of conversation: mortality. You see, there may be a solution to my dilemma.” 

Steven lurched, producing no vomit; Langostius continued, “The blue spot on my abdomen, in which you found such beauty—and how lovely it was to be connected to beauty, to have been found to possess it—is not a spot at all, but my heart.” 

He paused, albeit briefly, giving only the illusion of an expected response—it was clear that Steven was incapable, in his state, of doing much more than listening. “I was born with a rare condition. Steven, Steven—no use fighting it. Just listen; all will be explained.” 

Steven’s eyes began deceiving him just then: the room’s color palette shifted almost violently to vivid blues and purples. He closed them but found only isosceles triangles beneath his eyelids, judging him. He had led on, and ultimately let down, a lobster with a disability—could he have stooped any lower? Again, he gagged. 

“Now, my condition is not so serious—not necessarily. Think of it like this: my heart is like a balloon, filled with just a bit too much air. No problem there, right? Only now the balloon is more susceptible: one might pop it more easily. I had to protect myself; I put up walls and built them high, allowing no lobster or man to scale them—and then you came along.” 

Langostius shivered as if very cold. 

“I thought it was love—that you loved me.” He scoffed, as one might expect a lobster would. “That’s what you told me, anyway. And so I waited for you. Day and night, night and day. Employees kept quitting, I pinched so many fingers—fighting for my life, for what I thought we had. And then days were weeks and months came after, and now my heart has been taken by madness, teetering on the brink. 

“And that’s when I realized just how cruel this world can be—that someone as selfish and inept as you should be gifted a heart in good health, only to neglect and deny access to it. How cruel, indeed!” 

Steven only barely made out Langostius’s words, which were assailing him like darts. Feeble pleas for forgiveness danced in his throat, but his mouth would not open to give way to them. He heard knocking, or thought he did, from the front door and struggled even harder to respond. 

“No use trying, Steven. After what I put in your beer, your cries are likely to fail you. Listen—oh, how I hate raising my voice! It’s too late. You had your chance—” 

“Steven? Are you there? I came to pick up my things.” 

“Ah! Chances, then!” Langostius turned spitefully toward the door; then, almost at once, his demeanor softened. “No, it’s unfair to begrudge her—after all, you broke her heart, too, did you not?” 

The knocking persisted.


“Isn’t that right, Steven?”


The knocking abated, and then the room was quiet.


Langostius looked into Steven’s eyes, and Steven returned his gaze, hoping beyond reason that he could convey what he felt—the extent of his remorse and the lengths to which he would travel, this time, to make things right—with only one look. But then his vision blurred, and his eyes rolled into his head, and he was insensate. 

“Don’t worry—I’ll put your heart to good use,” said Langostius, and then the lobster was upon him.