The ghost of the hermit crab I killed when I was seven visited today. Or maybe yesterday, or maybe last week, or maybe ten years ago. I wouldn't know. But it's here today, nestled snug between my shoulder blades. The perfect invisible passenger. The ghost of my hermit crab was named for the beach I took it from. Briny brown sands, rocks slathered in algae, reeds like paper ribbons tangling my ankles. Salt in my nose. The sea here was too shallow to swim in, so my brother and I entertained ourselves by hunting through the shoal. The ghost of my hermit crab scrapes its claws on my spine, and I think of the red plastic bucket brimming with a sea of click-clack chelipeds. All the whorled, glossy shells; all the tiny, skittering legs. Every failure to climb out—I think of how my brother and I had laughed at the hermit crabs trying to get out. The ghost of my hermit crab does not ask questions, but I wonder—if it wonders—why I plucked it out of the water, why I brought it home with me, why I placed it in a bowl of tap water belatedly mixed with table salt. I had not known how to keep an animal alive. Not myself. Certainly not a hermit crab. You killed it, my brother had said, when we crowded around the fishbowl and its corpse. It's your fault. The body of my hermit crab was buried in a backyard since paved over for a veranda. The ghost of my hermit crab burrows itself into my sternum. I killed it, I think. It's my fault.
