My Mom Hates Crabs by Sydney Berger

               My mom hates crabs. Yes, I know how that sounds weird. I get that they pinch, and kinda startle you when you bury your toes beneath the sand, and their beady eyes suddenly appear as their shells toddle through the sand, but when I say she despises them, I mean it. For as long as I recall, whenever we go to the beach, she says,

                  “Just make sure you stay away from those pesky crabs, I don’t want any issues today.”

                At first I thought she meant this as a joke, until I realized it wasn’t. Every summer when we would go to the beach and she saw a crab, her mouth would purse and her eyes would squint in the most unnerving way. It was a visage of my mother that I just couldn’t describe. The light blue eyes twinkling in the sun would transform into a darkness, reflecting the navy blue of the ocean. Whenever I saw this look in her eyes, I actually feared her. Seeing my mother look so… what’s the word… omniscient? Ominous? Well both words are what I saw in her. It wasn’t always like this. She used to stare out into the ocean, and peace would wash over her. Once when I was four she took me to watch the sunrise, and I would venture to say it was one of the best moments of my life.

                “Look Skylar, you see how the sun is waking up now, it went to sleep for the night.”

                “Where was it sleeping, mommy? It couldn’t be in the water, wouldn’t that extinguish the sun?”

                  “It was sleeping below the horizon sweetie.”

                  “But isn’t that in the ocean?”

                 “Below the horizon is what you decide.”

                 We watched until the pink colors dissipated into the clouds and the sun's blinding light emerged, and once the sun was fully awake, we went home. I never quite understood what she meant by “below the horizon is what you decide”, because wasn’t there scientifically something there? There usually is an answer to everything.

                  Now, when she lies on the beach, she faces towards the green of the trees at the top of the beach, her back to the ocean. When she does look out into the ocean, she visibly restrains herself from staring too long, as if her eyes would drain the ocean of its water. And when she sees a hermit crab, of all things, her body tenses, and she moves deliberately off the sand and into the comfort of grass along the tree line.

                  Today, a college-junior, I am taking a walk on the beach with my mother, and when she saw a hermit crab she said bluntly,

                 “I’m going to go back to the umbrella and relax a little.”

                 “Ok sure,” not bothering to ask why, because I knew.

                I looked down and saw the crab, and when I did it pinched me.

                “Dammit!!” A pinhead of blood oozing from my toe where it got me.

                  I wiped it off and started to turn back towards the umbrella, but then before I knew it, the crab pinched me again, this time harder. My toe was throbbing.

                    “STOP,” I muttered angrily, as though it could understand what I was saying. The crab scuttled forward, and moved its claw in a motion for me to come. I gazed at it dumbfounded for a minute or so before I stepped forward. Once I got to the place where it rested, it moved forward the same distance and motioned again intent on having me follow it. I looked back at my mother sitting under the umbrella, hoping she would scream to me to come sit with her, but she didn’t so I followed the crab.

                     I didn’t even question the insanity of this, because truthfully stuff like this sometimes happens to me. For example, yesterday, I went for a walk in town, eating my usual chocolate ice cream with my usual chocolate sprinkles, listening to “Green Day” on full volume in my airpods. A bird then swooped down, landed on my head, and tried to pull my hair in the opposite direction. It didn’t even want the ice cream and I’m not sure it even wanted my hair. It’s like it wanted to mess with me.

                     “Ughhh, leave, ughh get away!” I screamed, flapping my hand to stave it off. Resisting the urge to cry in complete embarrassment, I dropped my ice cream on my crisp, white sneakers. I mean, why? Who has that happen to them? When the bird finally flew away, I turned to walk towards my house, sulking, my sullied sneakers carrying me backwards to watch the dancing of the fuchsia sunset.

                       I guess I lost track of time because I didn’t even realize that the sun was starting to set. I guess I also forgot that I was following a hermit crab. I thought about this for a second, and considered turning back, but when I looked back, no one was in sight. How far had I walked? I stopped, stretching my arms overhead, wiggling my toes in the wet sand, just checking I was still alive. It was as if I had been in a trance or something. My mind was completely vacant. Were my eyes open? I touched them, feeling the coarseness of a few grains of sand on my eyelids; yes they were open. The crab pinched me again, and this time I had no reaction, somewhat in a state of paralysis. I looked down at the crab, and then up again, and the sun was there. I mean, truly the sun was about 20 meters away from me.

                        I stared into it so hard, I started to see white. The thick silhouette of a woman emerged from underneath the sun, the light shining a pathway for her to walk on. It took about three minutes for her to actually reach me, but when she did, I just continued to stare, more terrified than confused.

                       “Hi,” she said gently.

                        I stared.

                      “Hii,” she said this time, more forcefully.

                    “Where am I? I don’t know how I ended up here, I was taking a walk, a aa andd I, um I don’t,  wh where am I?” I barely managed.

                     “You’re okay, don't worry, you’ve reached the sun,” she explained nonchalantly, as if this was a casual phenomenon.

                      At this moment, I started to curse, a bunch of angry words spewing out of my mouth, something I don’t do often. I begged her for a real response, and asked her to please let me leave so I could go home. I felt my chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath.

                       “You can’t go home until you decide where to put the sun, you’ve been chosen,” she said bluntly.

                       “Choose someone else then, I’m going home.”

                      “Once a year, someone is chosen to decide where to put the sun one night. During that period, time stops, so right now you are the only one in the world moving, and until you decide where to put the sun, it will stay that way.”

                         “Why me?” I thought about my mother for a second and her hatred of crabs. Had she had a similar experience? I needed to know.

                          “Do you know my mother? Was she chosen too?” I asked shyly.

                       “Yes, she was chosen not too long ago. Maybe 25 years I’m guessing, probably about your age or a little older.”

                        That sure seemed like a long time to me.

                        She continued, “But she failed her task. You see, she put the sun to sleep in the wrong place. She put it to sleep below the horizon.” I felt my anxiety welling. There is a right or wrong to this task.

                       “How much time do I have?” I asked. And then suddenly the idea that I could actually do something better than my mom motivated me.

                        “Time is on pause.” That’s all she said, and with that she turned her back and walked down the blindingly bright path into what seemed like the beginning of forever… whatever forever is.

Now what. More bewildered and disoriented than ever, I was lost, completely and utterly astray in space. I remembered what my mom said, “It was sleeping below the horizon sweetie.” But she had been wrong, hadn’t she, so was she even reliable at this point? It seemed right though, where else could the sun go? As a creature and student of science, grounded in math and physics and facts, I understand that factually the sun goes nowhere. The earth, spinning on its axis switches, rotates east, thus positioning the sun in a no longer visible light.

                          But the hard part in the facts is the perspective. If you’re on top of a mountain, it appears the sun disappears beneath another mountain at night. If you’re at the beach, below the sea, if you’re in the city, behind a skyscraper. So where? I truly didn’t know what to decide.

                           In some odd way, I’ve never felt more at ease. I considered this thought, gazing into the sun yet again. Time is the only thing that is continuous. The only thing that isn’t really a thing, but yet our entire lives orbit around it. From birth, to the second of death, time is this dormant creature, eating away at us until we are no more. In this moment, I guess – or not even moment because moment is a concept defined through time – in this thing, or in this period of oblivion, absolutely nothing mattered. But still, there was a right answer.

                          So I kept walking, and I followed the now tiny silhouette of the woman into the sun. I walked… and walked… walked some more… I kept walking, and let myself be. I decided that if my life had come to this peculiarity, what more could I do than just be. So in this period of oblivion, walking into the sun – which could have taken three minutes or three years, I don’t know as time was not of consequence – for once I listened to me. Me. Not my mom, not my sister, not my friends or the nasty people around me that squawked when the bird attacked me, or even the woman, now nothing more than a grain of sand in the distance.

                       “The sun stays, it doesn’t go to sleep, we are living in the sun,” I whispered to myself.

                        The sea moves, the mountains move, and the skyscrapers sway, but time doesn’t move, nor will it even move, unless apparently when it's paused once a year. The sun lives in time, watching over us as we, microscopic in its vision, move around for our lifespan.

                        I walked…. and walked… walked some more… I kept walking. It seemed right, and I finally understood what my mom had said to me. If the horizon is what we decide, then the sun sleeping below it is merely a concept. An oblivion only you can understand. I understood it in the “moment”, at least for now, which is all that mattered.

                         My mother had put the sun beneath the horizon, literally. Knowing her, she stuck to the most simplistic answer, and put it beneath the sea. She isn’t a very confident person. I guess that’s why I am the way I am, sometimes validating others rather than relying on myself.

                         Earlier this year in my advanced microbiology course, I devised and conducted a highly elaborate experiment in relation to cancer research. I was partnered with a man, who happens to be arrogant and attractive, yet surprisingly unsophisticated and senseless in anything related to science. I completed the experiment, hoping to pass it on to real research scientists, and pave the way for a PhD program later on. That was what I wanted, but what I got was absolutely nothing. The man took credit for all my work and secured a grant at a major university. It's not that I didn’t fight back, because trust me I did. I made endless phone calls and tried to get meetings with the lab and scientists who carried my work forward to explain the situation.

                      But in the end, I gave up. On the recognition for the research and more profoundly on the dream of being part of a field I felt so passionately about and thought would give me a sense of belonging. Truthfully, I had never found real belonging. Whether I was in school, or with friends, or even with family, nothing entirely “clicked”, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I would lie in bed and watch movies, and look at these girls with an abundance of friends and popularity. I resolved I didn’t want that, because knowing myself, I knew that wasn’t me. So I turned to science, which was the only thing that gave me this profound sense of purpose. And now that was somehow taken from me too. I ultimately took the easiest path, like my mother often does, and I gave up. Belonging wasn’t supposed to take effort, it was supposed to just work.

                     I walked…. and walked… walked even more… I kept walking, eyes stuck to the white of the sun. In this world of me, the sun, and no time, I realized I felt belonging for the first time. I guess in a world of me, and no expectation, belonging was boundless. In a world devoid of science and truth, reality and time faltered. Maybe the only real truth came from within. So I didn’t announce where I wanted to put the sun, because it wasn’t meant to go anywhere. The perspective wasn’t the beach where I was, the perspective was me.                 The perspective was always me, my effortless, true self, but I never really saw that before now.

                     I kept walking and I opened my eyes. I was back at the umbrella with my mom facing the grass. I faced the ocean.