I awoke to find I was in a cell with other prisoners, all of us bound, lightly floating, unable to direct our movements, unable to inflict pain. There were six of us, all old and fat behind the carapace. A shadowy figure loomed over the tank, a vague shape of white and beige, and suddenly a bunch of soft, small, beige pincers approached us from above.

The guy next to me, who had clearly been around the block a few times, blanched a paler shade of green and yelled, “Oh my god, no! Not me! I have children! I ate domoic acid very recently! I’m no good, I tell you, no good!” He broke off, sobbing, cowering his exoskeleton into a corner, trying to disappear.

With a great suction and splash, one of our mates was plucked upward and out, gone, I learned, to the boiling pot, water hotter than the hottest hot spring you’d ever visited, as hot as the ocean floor off Kealakekua. Through the glass murkily I could make out men in bibs, women in bibs. They banged their nutcrackers on the tables in unison, tossed back glasses of wine as if it were blood.

“They want to eat our flesh,” said my friend Snagger, “they want to crack open our hard bodies and scoop out our sweet, succulent flesh bathed in a light lemon butter sauce, accompanied by a side salad in a tangy tahini dressing.” “Run,” he cried, “run!” forgetting that we could not run. We were lobsters, arthropods in a primate’s world.

We bobbed, hog-tied, awaiting our fate. Was there no escape? Was there no ruse I could concoct in the teaspoonful of brown sludge that constituted my brain? I did the one thing I could do: I thrashed. I bucked, I shimmied, I spy-hopped and somersaulted. I climbed upon my brother’s back and vaulted up and out of that tank, hit the floor and made for the door—scuttling for my life, a clatter of claws and determination. I went faster than you’d think a lobster could go. As I reached the door, a brassy woman in a fur coat opened it to come in, and I was a free lobster in Paris. I felt unfettered and alive.

February 2016