Illustration by MGC

The crab trap was neon orange. He whipped it like a frisbee, far out, and watched it sink below the dark blue of the sea. It was early and he was the only one on the pier, cold in his camping chair. The old chicken bones he used as bait were stuffed in a plastic bag beside him, and he could smell them mixing with the salt of the ocean and the damp morning breeze.

One thing he liked about crabbing was that you didn’t have to wait for a tug. You could just sit there and watch the water, read a book if you wanted to, and wait however long you saw fit. Sometimes his wife would come with him and they would sit there together in the sort of silence that came from years of being next to someone. But it had been a while now since she’d joined him.

Usually, he would talk to the other crabbers. They all had the same traps as him, the ones he made. He was famous around here for that. It was a little business; he even had blue baseball caps with his company name embroidered on them in pearly white. They would talk about the weather and their grandkids and debate what bait was the best to use. It was predictable and gave him enough socializing to get by.

The only time he could really be honest with himself was when he sat out there in the quiet of the morning. Then, he could finally admit that this was never the way he saw his life going. He thought about his father wading in the ocean, the water up to his knees. That was in Malaysia, where the sea was clearer and lighter and warmer, and the sun had beaten down on their bare backs. Where he ate mangoes and coconuts from the tree. There was a photo in an old album of his wife and his father, laughing as they pried open a coconut with a machete. In that preserved moment she looked impossibly young, her smile impossibly wide. His father’s dark hair and broad shoulders captured next to her in fading sepia tones.

He thought about the chicken bones sitting now on the ocean floor like some kind of offering. When he was a child, his father was many things: a fisherman, a gifted healer. He could dive for ages, never coming up for air. Down there, on the ocean floor, his father would leave a freshly slaughtered chicken to appease the gods. He had always felt protected, held by his father’s sacrifices. That was a long time ago, and a long way from here, but sometimes when he sat on this pier, he swore for a second he could see his father emerging from between the waves. Then he would shake his head and see nothing but a buoy or the slick head of a seal.

It was funny to be back by the water when he’d spent his whole life getting away from it. For a while he and his wife had lived in Los Angeles, that desert of cars and hot pavement. He’d been taken in by all of it, the gambling and women and shiny things, until there was nothing left. He was proud of a lot of things in his life, but he wasn’t proud of that. He associated LA with death, not of any one person, but of his own upward trajectory. A plane climbing up and up and then crashing to the ground.

After twenty minutes, he slowly pulled the trap out of the water. It was a ring trap, and as he hauled it up it closed quickly, squishing the crabs inside into a mess of legs and pincers. When he opened it, the crabs sat there disoriented for a moment, then started to scuttle around on the wood.

When his granddaughter was little, he used to bring her here sometimes. When he’d release the crabs she would giggle and scream, running away from them down the pier. He would pick up the crabs and chase her, pincers out.

Now, there was no one here to chase and his granddaughter hadn’t called in months. Still, he smiled as he grabbed the crabs. He lifted them up by their back legs, dropping them in the bucket he’d brought with him.

His wife was on oxygen and could barely leave the apartment, but when he got home with the day’s catch she’d still wheel the tank to the kitchen and stand there at the stove. He’d watch her kill and clean the crabs with remorseless, practiced hands. So small and covered in purple-blue veins. The clear tube winding up her body, nubs in her nose above her unchanging smile.

The doctor had told him not to have any salt. His daughter kept reminding him of that, pleading with him. But everything tasted bland, and it didn’t feel like home. That was all he wanted these days, something that tasted like the water he’d grown up next to, that he’d spent so much of his life in.

It was funny that he’d always wanted to leave home and now he was here and all he could think about was the fact that he’d probably never go back, not before he died. And so this was it, the crabbing and the dock and an ocean separating him from his own memories. Maybe he liked being here in the morning light, alone, because he could imagine that right there, past the mountains, the water turned turquoise, and the evergreen trees turned to palms, and his own father was lying on the ocean floor with an offering clutched in his arms.

The trap flashed orange again as he threw it back out into the water. The sun was coming up stronger over the mountains now. It was still beautiful, though he realized then that it was not the sunrise he longed to see; a revelation that came from the middle of his chest like a tether to another world. He would go home in a few hours with his bucket, and his wife would make chili crab and he would hold her small hands in his, and maybe he could call his daughter to come over and have lunch with them and they would lick the spicy oil off their fingers and laugh and maybe that could be all he wanted.

SOFIA OSBORNE is a Singaporean-Canadian writer, editor and audio producer based in Vancouver. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Tyee, The Narwhal, Montecristo, and more.