Work Text:
Statement of Tamara Neill, regarding her employment while enrolled in an exchange programme at Florida Atlantic University. Statement taken directly.
I don’t know why I signed up for that exchange programme. Well, I do, I guess. I was looking for—a change. All right, fine, what I was actually trying to do was get over a breakup. It’s funny now, we hadn’t even been together that long, but eleven months feels like forever when you’re twenty and I’ll admit I was a bit of a mess. Every corner of campus was a reminder of her, all of my friends were her friends too, you know how it goes, and I thought, new place, new people, new me, right? Stupid, really. It’s not like anyone’s ever successfully outrun heartbreak.
I guess it kind of worked, but only because swapping continents in order to avoid my ex turned out to be enough of a disaster that I didn’t really have much time to mope around and dwell. I’m not going to pretend that Florida was exactly my first choice, but like I said, I decided on the whole thing rather on the fly and by the time I was filling out my paperwork there were only so many of my uni’s partner schools still accepting applications. Everything was more expensive than I expected; the cost of my enrollment was covered by the programme, but there was housing to worry about and books, along with my driving desire to eat every once in a while, and it was made clear to me by student services that even if I could’ve found off-campus work on a J-1, the school wasn’t likely to allow it. I looked into the on-campus jobs, but the hours were limited and the pay was shit; none of them would have seen me through the duration of my ill-conceived plan to escape my own feelings, much less given me enough to land on my feet once I got home.
Here’s some advice for free: never take a job offer from someone who finds you crying into the blueberry muffin you bought with the last of your pocket change at a just-off-campus café.
I’m being harsh, I suppose. I really do think that Paula just felt bad for me and was trying to give me a leg up, and she knew what it was like to struggle – she’d been running her aquarium shop for thirty-five years, but between the big box stores and the online retailers she had been struggling to make it by for the last ten. Us meeting seemed like the best kind of coincidence, one hard-luck case helping another: she would pay me under the table, so the school never needed to know, and while she couldn’t pay me well, there’d be no taxes taken off the top and she could offer me more hours and later into the evening, which put it a step or two up from campus employment.
I guess in retrospect I shouldn’t have been surprised that Paula was willing to cut other legal corners when it came to her business, but at first it all seemed normal enough. I can’t say I liked it, not really – keeping the tanks clean was grueling work, and I didn’t like all of those round, staring eyes watching me. When one of the little things went belly up you can guess whose job it was to go fishing before the customers could notice, and any time the ladies in the big cichlid tank at the center of the shop were busy spawning the whole place just reeked, like coming home after being gone for a week and getting whacked in the face with the fact that your flatmate has enjoyed a little sexcation in your absence and your couch is probably no longer neutral territory, you know?
I’m, uh. I’m guessing from your face that maybe that isn’t as much of a universal experience as I’d assumed.
Right, sorry. All of the customers seemed to know a lot more about it than I did; I’d never done much more than try to keep the minnows me and my brothers caught as kids alive, and usually I’d failed. Like I said, I wasn’t in love with the work, but I was grateful for it, and it kept me busy, which is probably why it took me a couple weeks to realize that a lot of Paula’s clientele arrived after close of business and through the side door. At first I thought—God, it seems so silly now, but I thought it might be drugs? One of the girls I met in my maths class got me binge-watching Breaking Bad, local fish lady deals meth out of her stockroom to make ends meet didn’t seem like that much of a reach. Eventually I figured out that she was dealing, but not in drugs. Turns out that there are maybe a lot of fish that it’s illegal to catch, or illegal to sell, or both? The person taking them out of the water doesn’t have the proper licence to be doing it, or they’re harvesting from somewhere that they shouldn’t be, or maybe a certain kind of fish is even endangered in the wild or invasive or something and selling them has been banned entirely, but—yeah, it’s ridiculous, you can see why I thought drugs were more likely. Big business, though, as it turns out, and some of the serious hobbyists are wild to own something rare. I really think it was the only thing keeping A Sea Change – that was the name of the shop – afloat. Heh. Afloat. Do you—okay, yeah, you get it, sorry.
Maybe it should’ve bothered me. I can’t pretend that I care much now, or cared much then, about illicit fish trafficking, but it was still illegal. It didn’t, though. Bother me. I just couldn’t see the harm, although I’m sure there’s a conservationist or two who would be more than willing to explain it to me. Besides, I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be, too, and I sort of figured that if I ratted Paula out, she would do the same to me. Probably that was at least part of why she wanted to hire me. Mutually assured destruction, and all. Getting in trouble with student services probably doesn’t rank with going to jail for fish crimes, I guess, but it felt like it at the time.
I got to know some of Paula’s regular customers. Got to know some of her regular suppliers, too. Most of them were on the up-and-up, but a few, the ones who stocked the back room with corals from Puerto Rico or angelfish from the Keys, lionfish and bullseye snakehead, I got to know them too. There was this one guy, I didn’t meet him more than a time or two, but he—I remember him. Salesa. I don’t know his first name, Paula never used it. I don’t think he was in the fish business, but sometimes he’d come across something valuable along the way and when that happened he’d bring it in for Paula to have a look at. The last time he came into the shop during my time there, it was with this big pile of live rock.
Do you know what live rock is? I barely do, and I worked for an aquarium shop for three months. It’s not really alive, but it’s made of things that used to be and covered in things that still are, bacteria and algae and the like. You use it in saltwater aquariums. It helps filter the tank and keep the nitrate levels manageable, and you can use it to seed corals and things. The stuff Salesa brought in, it was from somewhere in the Caribbean. I don’t remember where. I do remember that he sold it to her for cheap, because Paula was the surprised kind of happy about it after; apparently, Salesa usually drove a hard enough bargain for him to barely be worth dealing with, but this time he’d parted with the goods for a song.
It was nice rock, too. I guess. Paula thought so. She was practically cooing as she looked over what Salesa had brought her. She asked him how he had got his hands on it, which was a little odd in and of itself, because he was the kind of supplier she didn’t usually ask too many questions of; better not to know, if you catch my drift.
He got this—this strange look in his eyes. Or maybe he didn’t, maybe I’m just imagining that’s what happened, because of what came after. “The beach was closed,” he said with a shrug, like that was any kind of answer. “This year, and the year before that. I wanted to know why. I found more than I bargained for.” He gave this little laugh, but I didn’t get the joke. I don’t think Paula did, either. “I knew you’d give it a good home.”
Paula started setting up a new saltwater display tank with her prize the very next day, right in the center of the shop near the cichlids. Most of it she kept in the back to sell, but it’s not like anyone was going to be able to pinpoint when she got the rock, and it could’ve been sitting in a tank for years before the bans against harvesting went into effect; no harm in having some of it out to be seen. For a while it just looked like an empty aquarium to me, although she had me doing fifty percent water changes on the damn thing about as often as I did on the tanks with actual tenants. Eventually she added some snails, and some corals. Finally it was deemed fit for fish life, including a fairy wrasse that even I could see was pretty impressive to look at.
We found it dead on the floor of the shop the next morning.
That wasn’t weird. Even with an expert like Paula, deaths happen, and it’s not as unusual as you might think for a fish to hop the edge of the tank. She figured something must’ve spooked it in the night and sent it leaping to its inglorious demise.
It kept happening, though. The salinity was fine, pH was good, no signs of disease, but none of the fish we put in that tank survived more than a couple days. They would disappear, or be found outside the tank when I opened shop. When Paula spotted a sailfin tang at the bottom of the tank with its side slashed open, she finally admitted that it wasn’t the fish or the water or any one of a dozen other things that can go wrong when setting up a tank causing the problem: it was the rock that Salesa had sold her, or what had likely come in with the rock. Hitchhikers, they’re called. Worms, sometimes, but in this case probably a crab. It would’ve started out small, hiding in some crevice or hole after being plucked from the ocean, easy to miss, although Paula swore up and down that she’d checked it all over thoroughly before setting up the tank. Obviously the crab wasn’t small anymore, given what it’d done to the tang, and she figured she’d have an easy enough time finding it. She ended up tearing apart the tank, the corals, the wired together rock, all of it. She didn’t find anything.
That’s about when things started going wrong with the other tanks.
It was the saltwater aquariums first. Same pattern: fish on the floor, fish missing, fish cut to ribbons. That was strange enough – no way a crab should’ve been able to travel between tanks, and she’d only used the live rock Salesa had sold her in the one – but then we started having trouble with the freshwater fish, too. Once in a while I thought I’d see something, a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye in one of the tanks as I locked up the shop or a black-tipped, hairy claw poking out of the ornamental castle in the tetra tank while I did a water change. I’d tell Paula and we’d relocate the fish and take the whole thing apart, but we never did find that crab.
Poor Paula was at her wit’s end. It was her business, her stock that was disappearing or being destroyed, but... I know I probably haven’t painted her in the most flattering light, but she really cared about all those cold-blooded, staring little things. She was accustomed to them dying on her here and there, but she took the best care of them she could and they mattered to her. She used to make me do this silly little moment of silence before disposing of the floaters. After all this started, I found her red-eyed and stuffy in the stockroom more than once. Then she went quiet and distracted. She’d wander around the shop and stare into the empty tanks and the few full ones. Eventually she started—humming to herself while she checked the tanks, under her breath, this tuneless little song, and snapping her fingers as she walked up and down the shop’s aisles. She didn’t even seem to care that she was spooking the few customers who came in. Honestly, I thought she was losing it a bit. Not that I blamed her.
When I walked in one morning just before final exams and found the cichlid tank empty and myself standing in dead fish to the tops of my trainers, I decided that I’d had enough. I was two weeks from going home and it wasn’t worth failing to hold on to a job that I wouldn’t be keeping for much longer anyway. I closed the shop, cleaned up the mess as best I could, and used a lot of language my mum wouldn’t have approved of. I, uh, won’t repeat any of it. I’m guessing you wouldn’t approve, either. Not that I’m saying you’re—sorry.
Paula usually arrived after me on days when I didn’t have an early lecture and could open up, but she was much later than usual getting in that morning. I spent a lot of time fuming at having to clean up on my own – Christ, and I’d thought they’d stank while they were alive and breeding, this was something else – and mentally composing my resignation. When I was done, Paula still wasn’t there, and it occurred to me that maybe she was in her office in the back, although I wasn’t sure how she could’ve missed the noise of me banging around and getting buckets and mops, swearing a blue streak the whole time. I decided it was worth a check anyway.
Paula’s office barely warranted the name, two walls of unpainted plasterboard that squared off a corner of the stockroom and ended two feet before they hit the ceiling, broken only by a door. As I walked through the stockroom, I realized that the tanks that had once held Paula’s more exotic merchandise – the fish she really wasn’t supposed to have – were all empty. I tried to remember if any of the tanks I had passed on the main floor had been occupied, or if they were empty too, if I had, perhaps, spent the last few days tending to nothing but water and fake plants and kitschy plastic mermaids. I tried to remember the last time I had spoken to a customer, if it had been two days before or three, or even longer than that, and realized that I couldn’t.
I was on edge by the time I got to the office door. More on edge than I should’ve been, maybe; it must’ve taken me two minutes at least to convince myself to knock. The door swung open, but it was dark inside, with nothing to see by but the light that bled over the tops of the unfinished walls and through the doorway from the stockroom. I didn’t go inside, just waited on the threshold while my eyes adjusted. I picked out the familiar landmarks first: the line of tall metal filing cabinets along one wall, the desk wedged into what little space remained. Then I saw Paula. She was slumped in her chair, head tilted back and mouth open, and by then I could see well enough to tell that—this—sorry, this is harder than I thought it would be to talk about. I could tell that her eyes were gone. No blood, no gore, just these dark holes in the middle of her face.
I thought she was dead. She had to be, right? But then she lifted her head and—she didn’t look at me. She was past looking at anyone. She turned her face in my direction, and she said, “Tamara, come in. Close the door behind you.” She sounded so calm about it, so casual, like this was any other day and the worst I should’ve been afraid of was a scolding from my boss about not restocking the koi food.
I almost did as she asked. I’m not sure why? I was shaking, sweating, already more than half prepared to just turn on my heel and run, but I almost went into that office. I might’ve, but then I saw—there was something poking out of the place where her eye used to be, something black-tipped and hairy. A claw. For a moment I just stood there and stared, and then a leg slid out next to the claw, long and pale and segmented, and she didn’t even seem to notice when the point rested on her cheek and dug in, like it was trying to—.
Like a crab that’s hidden itself inside of some rocky fissure, trying to drag itself out of its new home and into the light. Exactly like that, in fact.
I don’t know if I screamed. I probably did. I’m not the bravest person, you might’ve noticed; I ran away from home to avoid my ex-girlfriend, and I doubt I faced a, a monster crab burrowing into my boss’ brain with any kind of equanimity. I do know that I ran, and that I didn’t stop until my ribs were cramping hard enough that I figured it was either stop or pass out.
I called my mum that night. We weren’t on good terms, not back then, and I think it was that as much as how panicked I sounded that convinced her to wire me the money to fly home early; she knew I wouldn’t have called if I wasn’t desperate. Needless to say, I failed my exams, but I wasn’t really in any state to worry about that for a while. It’s almost funny. I’m not sure I ever would have patched things up with my parents if it weren’t for what happened. They thought I was having some kind of nervous breakdown, I think, but they handled it better than they had handled anything with me before I went away for university. I got back on track eventually. I think that’s why I came in here, to finally—put it all to rest, I guess? It’s not like I can tell my therapist about killer crabs, so thanks for that, Ms—sorry, I’m rubbish with names, it was Robinson, right? Thank you for listening. Maybe now that I’ve told someone, I can stop thinking about it. Stop dreaming about it.
Maybe someday, I’ll even stop feeling guilty. It’s just, I worry.
We sold a lot of that rock before we realized that something was wrong.