Consider Stealing the Lobster by Jonathan McDaniel

There was nothing more to it: I wanted the lobster. I stared at its bright red fabric, its drooping antennae, safely tucked between Nicholas’s body and his arm, every afternoon during nap time while the other kids drooled on their foam mats. I had a black bear, a perfectly adequate companion; dark, half-globe eyes in a perpetual state of concern, as though I might abandon him at any moment. His worries were not unjustified—bears were ubiquitous, as were most mammals, for that matter, in the Central Church daycare facility. The lobster was exotic; it represented worlds I had yet to discover, lands painted green with bizarre looking flora, vast seas teeming with monstrous creatures. It also represented the live lobster tank at the Kroger on Shelby Drive, where I would watch them creep along the edges of the glass, their claws shackled by strips of green tape.

I cannot say how much planning was involved in the crime. I must have known, already, that taking things that did not belong to me was wrong, because something kept me from prying the toy from his little hands in stark daylight, in full view of his glossy headlight eyes. Instead, I waited until nap time, watching as he drew deeper and deeper breaths. Miss Amy, the woman in charge, must have been futzing with the VCR; she did not see me crawl to Nicholas’s mat and snatch the lobster away. I snuck to the corner of the room and stuffed it in my blue book bag.

When nap time was over, Nicholas, of course, spiraled into a frenzy. He sprinted to Miss Amy, sniveling and inconsolable, and told her what was wrong. She had us sit down in a circle in the middle of the room, all of us except Nicholas, who stood by her side, her hands perched on his trembling shoulders.

“Do y’all know Nicholas’s lobster?”

All of us nodded in unison. She asked if we would help him look for it, and we nodded again. The children spent fifteen minutes walking around the room, rummaging through piles of blocks and crawling under chairs in search of the runaway crustacean. I hoped my face wouldn’t give away the fact that I knew exactly where it was. I followed the other kids’ lead by turning over a few scattered beanbags and opening cabinet doors. Nicholas cried in the corner. I am still disturbed that his tears did not affect me, not in the slightest.

That evening my mother opened my book bag to remove my lunchbox. Upon seeing the lobster, buried in the folds of my sweater, its beady, black eyes staring up at her, she asked me where I had gotten it.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She reaffirmed what I already knew—that it did not belong to me. She pressed, determined to reverse the train of my delinquency before it could leave the station. She waved the toy in the air as she spoke, trying to make me look at it, as a prosecutor holding a murder weapon for all the jury to see and tremble at the thought. I sat on the ground, chin to my chest, quietly drawing lines in the brown carpet between my legs. I did finally confess the lobster belonged to Nicholas. I did not tell her I had lifted it from under his nose while he slept, or that I silently watched as the class searched for it in vain.

The next morning my mother made me return the lobster to Nicholas. A cold fog had settled in the grass outside the room, casting a gray tinge on the bright tangerine walls. The kids looked on as they sloughed off their backpacks and hung their coats. I felt their eyes in my gut. My mother stood with her arms folded, watching me place it in his little fat hands, only the second time I had ever gotten to touch it.

Weeks later, I pressed my head against the lobster tank at Kroger, tracing their shapes in the moisture I had breathed onto the glass. Their shells were brown and speckled with dark blue spots, unlike the one I had stolen. I asked the man behind the counter why they weren’t red. “They turn red when they die,” he told me, and by that he meant they turn red when they are cooked, but that is neither here nor there, because it occurred to me that Nicholas’s lobster was dead, and I felt sorry for what I had done, for taking his dead friend.

Jonathan McDaniel is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Nonfiction MFA program, and his work has most recently appeared in The Point Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Rumpus. He works as a copywriter and lives in Chicago with his dog. Find him on twitter @JonathanMcD.