Never Buy Your Daughter a Hermit Crab
I’ll never forget how many hermit crabs we saw in Atlantic City. We visited this beach casino town once when I was ten, as part of a family vacation. Along the city’s seemingly never-ending boardwalk, we walked past tens of small beach shops selling hermit crabs as pets. I begged my mother go inside one of them so we could take a closer look. All the crabs had such colorfully painted shells, I thought they were so beautiful. Naturally, I asked if I could bring one home and promised to take such good care of it. With my hamster having just passed a few weeks before this trip, it didn’t take long for my mother to say yes.
So there I was, left to choose my own crab, along with another shell for when it would eventually grow up and need to move to a bigger home. I also bought a clear plastic cage, some gravel and food pellets. I left Atlantic City that day satisfied and excited, holding my little Hermie in his shiny new cage the entire ride home. However, my mother should not have bought me that hermit crab. By that point, though, it was too late.
Hermie made me very happy for a few days. But the honeymoon phase was short, and I’d go on to resent him for the rest of his sad life. The moment I got home, I placed him on my palm and felt his clammy claws slithering across my hand and his stringy antenna feeling their way across all surfaces. His big purple claw scared me the most, and made me think he would pinch me at any moment. I was conflicted; I felt as though I had to play with him, because I made a promise and wanted to keep it. Yet on the other hand, I hated the pungent smell that seeped out whenever I would open his cage. Each time I heard the crab shuffling through the gravel, I would wince. I loathed how ugly he was and wished my fluffy, cuddly, dead hamster could be resurrected instead.
Simultaneously, I felt sorry for the abandoned crustacean. I was constantly wondering if he felt alone, if he missed his old life and his Atlantic City buddies. For this reason, I decided to paint a bunch of leaves, greenery and bodies of water on the outside of his plastic home, with window paint from my art kit. With this, I felt satisfied. I knew deep down that Hermie must be very lonely, but at least I tried to give him a nice life. I couldn’t love him, but I got used to him.
Several months passed, and I would check on the crab once every few days to replace his water and food, my nose now accustomed to his smell. But on one particular day, instead of finding one Hermie, there were two! As I lifted the shell of the Hermie I recognized, all I found inside of him was a dried up, crusty skeleton. It was lifeless and crinkled like saran wrap when I poked at it with a pencil. In the other shell, the bigger one I bought as a spare when I first got him, lied a naked, fleshy pink hermit crab. It was the most disgusting thing I had seen — as though someone peeled off Hermie’s skin to reveal the raw layer underneath. I ran screaming to show my mother, but all she could do was try and calm me down and explain that this was supposed to happen.
Unable to deal with Hermie any longer, I just left him and his exoskeleton in the cage. It didn’t take long for me to forget about him and the twin. Life moved on, until one day when I came home from school and realized that the older, smaller shell was empty. Hermie ate himself! I had, at this point, reached a whole new level of disgust and regretted getting him more than ever.
Nonetheless, Hermie’s old shell was tossed away and his cage got a spring cleaning to welcome him into adulthood. New body, new me, as they say. With a clean cage, I decided to start over, just like Hermie. This time, I was going to get it right, treat Hermie better and make his life more comfortable. But now that Hermie was an adult, I reasoned that he would not want to play that often anyways. So the play times dropped, from once a week, to every two weeks, and then three. I felt like a failed pet owner in this regard, but I made it up to Hermie by cleaning his cage more regularly. I wiped off the window paint, because he was an adult and probably didn’t like the childish decor anymore. Besides, the paint smeared the last time I cleaned his cage and I didn’t feel like repainting it. So Hermie lived on. His most basic needs were met, but all the joy was missing from his world. I wondered what Hermie dreamed about, what his perfect day would have look like. I knew he probably hated his life and that we were both waiting for him to die.
Then one day, he finally did. About a year passed for that moment to happen. A week of loving him, a year of counting down the time he had left. It all happened so unexpectedly. I came home from school one day, lifted the lid off from his cage, and picked Hermie up by his shell. His body, now limp and lifeless, just fell out. Even to this day, I can remember the feeling of his body dropping out of that shell, landing with a thump from its own weight. I finally saw Hermie, all of him. He didn’t have to hide anymore, he was free. His body looked so different, so small, not as scary or intimidating as I thought. He was just a helpless crustacean, with a weak little body. All he ever wanted was a nice, long life, just like anybody else, and I could not give that to him.
We threw Hermie out and I was happy it was finally allover. My mother placed his shell on one of the shelves in my bedroom, surrounded by other little trinkets. It gathered dust. For the most part I forgot it was there, but occasionally it would catch my eye. So I’d pick it up and feel its coldness, look inside and see its hollowness. It brought me back to the feeling of Hermie’s body falling out and landing on the dirty gravel. The guilt lingered, despite how hard I tried to forget.
It’s been years since his passing, but Hermie still crosses my mind every once in a while. I was just a child, I didn’t know any better, I think to myself. But I cannot justify the guilt that’s always there, more than a decade later.
A few years ago, I found the shell again when packing up my room for college. I did a google search for ‘hermit crabs’ and found photos of them at the Atlantic City pet shops. Still there to this day, living inside colorful shells. I also looked up how long they live in the wild. 30 years. I learned that they are extremely social animals who love having hermit crab friends. Not only that, but they need several inches of gravel to bury into, not the half inch I used to lay down for Hermie.
All of the things they are meant to have, I was unable to give. Every once in a while, I remember Hermie and the sadness rushes back all over again. I cannot visit Atlantic City again.
