Illustrations by Alison Berry
Guest art by Bettina M. George and Secil Cokan
Episode 3: Fresh Fish
Hana was on her way home with a loaf of sourdough in tow when she began noticing a strange chittering sound that seemed to be following her. Every time she turned around the chittering would stop, but it was not such a threatening sound that she felt the need to speed up; it was altogether nonhuman and almost cute in a way, like a recording of a young bird being played at the wrong speeds on a record player. More than anything she was made curious by the sound, and once or twice fought the urge to investigate the surrounding bushes and trash bins and other obstructions that were potentially hiding some noisy stalker.
By the time she made it home the sound had long ceased to harass her: either her stalker had given up or it had learned to be silent. In any case she was not worried about it. She trumpeted the arrival of the sourdough as she entered the house and paraded it through the living room, past her mother and father and sister, and her mother and father got out of their comfortable grooves to follow the bread into the kitchen. The three of them sat around the table and cut their own slices from the pliant loaf, enjoying each lip-pinching bite while Hana’s sister turned the volume up on the tv in order to drown out their moans of pleasure. When they went for their second helpings, Hana’s sister turned the tv off and ran upstairs to her room.
‘Sourdough is even better than watermelon, if you ask me,’ Hana’s mother said, though nobody had thought to ask her.
More than half the loaf was gone by now, so Hana’s mother wrapped the remainder in its paper bag and secured it in the breadbox. Her parents began talking about work and what their plans for the weekend were, and when there was a knock – or rather a polite tap mixed with light scratching – at the door, nobody seemed to notice except Hana. She excused herself from the table and headed to the front door, where the scrabbling had become more animated.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ she called to the impatient caller, and then she opened the door.
Hana was very much confused by the sight of nobody there, and then she looked down. Resting on the front steps of her house, with one massive claw raised in the middle of a knocking motion, was a vibrantly red lobster that was twice the size of a normal lobster. Hana gasped. Then she nearly lost her temper. She stepped out onto the front steps, careful not to squash the lobster, closed the door behind her, and then began whispering agitatedly at the unexpected guest.
‘It’s bad enough that stuff like you happens,’ Hana said to it, ‘but to come to my house and knock on my front door . . . My family is important to me, they mean a lot to me, and I won’t have something like you come along and whisk them away to a world where monsters exist. All they know about the river monster was that it was a mutated sea creature that managed to sneak into the school. The word “monster” never came up. I like to keep it that way. I like normalcy. I don’t like double-sized lobsters showing up, feeling around with their extra-long feelers, looking up at me with their adorable, beady black eyes. No sir, I don’t like it at all!’
The lobster made a chittering sound and Hana knew then that this was what had been following her. It felt her legs with its extra-long feelers and looked up at her with its beady eyes, those shiny black marbles somehow containing a pleading look in them.
No matter how hard Hana willed it not to, she could feel her heart melting inside her chest. As if detecting her vulnerability, the lobster reached under itself and grabbed a small, white, rectangular card out of a pouch that had been tied around its waist; it then offered the card up to Hana with a heavy claw. Bending down, Hana took the little card from the peculiar creature, however reluctantly.
FOLLOW, the card read.
‘You want me to follow you?’ Hana asked.
The lobster somehow managed to look up at her as though she were stupid. Hana decided to chalk it up to her own imagination.
‘Why should I follow you?’
The lobster appeared to hesitate, or at the very least it remained still for a moment before reaching under itself again and pulling out another card. Hana grabbed it before the lobster could lift it towards her.
BECAUSE, the card read.
Hana rolled her eyes and handed the cards back to the lobster.
‘Maybe some other time,’ Hana said. ‘Tonight I just want to relax.’
But as soon as she turned towards the door something hit the backs of her legs twice; she swung around to hurl verbal abuse at the lobster but saw that there were two new cards lying at her feet: one read WAIT and the other read WATER.
Hana was anything but cruel, so she quickly went into the house to fulfill the lobster’s request. Luckily her parents had left the kitchen for some other room in the house. She filled a glass with tap water and dashed some salt into it, then brought the hasty concoction out to the lobster, which she splashed it on.
‘Now go away before I come back out with butter,’ Hana said, and shooed the lobster off the steps.
Much to Hana’s lack of surprise, the lobster came back the next day. James had called earlier to let her know that he would be spending the day repairing a friend’s bike, but that he would be free for the evening. This left Hana alone for the first time in a while, since her parents were out taking her sister to the orthodontist and Henri was away visiting his grandparents. So when the tapping and scratching sounded at the door again she was almost thankful; if not for the lobster then she would have found herself doing something awful like homework.
The lobster was still as red as it had been yesterday, only this time Hana realised what was so odd about it.
‘You’ve been cooked!’ Hana cried, and she bent down to rest a sympathetic hand between its eyes. ‘Who could’ve done this to you?’
Out came another card which Hana snatched up.
KAPPA.
‘Kappa? You mean the river monster?’ Hana asked as she looked at the card in alarm. ‘I thought it was dead!’
Two more cards came, one after the other: the first read SHE IS and the second read THANKS. Hana looked at the lobster and saw kindness in its eyes; for the first time she felt like the river monster’s death was justified for a reason other than the monster’s inherent evilness.
‘I’ll follow you,’ Hana told the lobster, ‘but only if you give me a real reason to this time.’
The lobster pulled out a card, placed it facedown on the cement and pushed it towards her. Hana picked up the card and dropped it almost as quickly once she saw what was printed there.
‘Henri! Did something happen to Henri?’
The lobster produced another card and Hana nearly tore it as she pulled it from the lobster’s claw. WATER, it read.
‘Water? Is he drowning?’ Hana began to feel faint. When the lobster did not hand over another card, however, understanding dawned on her. ‘Oh! You need water.’
Just like before she raced into the kitchen and poured a mixture of water and salt into a glass. She dumped it all on the lobster when she returned and again asked about Henri.
The next card was the FOLLOW card from yesterday, and Hana did what it asked as the lobster skittered across the street, leading her through backyards, over hills, past parks, into and out of a library, and generally giving her a tour of places in the city she would never have seen otherwise. The adventure continued to take stranger and stranger turns until they finally wound up in an unusual alley located somewhere downtown.
The most unusual thing about the alley, outside of how clean it was, was that it had no openings other than the one leading up to the sky. Hana had had to take a ladder down to the bottom while the lobster slid down via a very long string, and they had come down from the roof of a small building that was only accessible from a large hill of artificial turf. By the time they reached their destination, Hana was dirtier than she had been in a very long time, the fronts of her legs nearly blackened. She no longer had any sense of direction and she strongly doubted she could ever find this place again on her own.
The lobster started towards one of the far ends of the alley, where a large pink chair was facing away from them. If somebody was sitting in that chair then they would have to be very small, since Hana could not see the top of a head over it nor any legs dangling down from the bottom. She approached timidly, a tiny part of her screaming that it was some kind of trap. The lobster stopped on a line made from masking tape and Hana stopped beside the lobster. The chair swivelled around.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ came a deep bass voice. Hana wondered if it was coming from behind the grotesquely overweight tabby cat that was sitting in the pink chair, its paws set comfortably on the armrests.
‘But I’m a girl and this is a lobster,’ she said. Whoever had greeted them could not have seen them if they referred to them as ‘gentlemen’, she thought.
‘It is not my place to discriminate between sexes and species,’ the deep voice rumbled. Hana looked all around to see where the voice could be coming from.
‘Where are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m right in front of you,’ said the voice.
Hana looked at the fat cat and the pink chair.
‘You’re the chair!’ she exclaimed in disbelief.
‘No, I’m the cat!’ rumbled the great, gross beast, and Hana finally noticed its lips moving when it spoke.
‘Sorry, I guess a talking cat is just conventional compared to the other things that’ve been happening to me lately,’ she explained.
‘Understandable,’ agreed the cat. ‘Now, you may be wondering why I called you here.’
‘Is it about Henri?’
‘Yes, it is about your friend. He is in danger. I have decided to help you help him as a personal favour for saving the lobster’s life; the lobster has been my servant for as long as I have been king of this alleyway, and to lose him would have been to lose a tremendous asset to my kingdom. I thank you, young Hana.’ Despite not having a neck, the cat managed to turn its head to the lobster. ‘You may return to your chamber.’
The lobster bowed imperceptibly, skittered past the chair and splashed into a black plastic tub filled with water.
‘And now to business. Your friend Henri is currently being fed buttery dishes by a pair of lobsters who have abducted his grandparents and replaced them. Henri is not aware of this. The villainous lobsters are fattening him up as a sacrifice for their lobster god, which does not actually exist. Their plan is to eat Henri in their god’s honour once he has been properly fattened; it is their belief that, upon this sacrifice, their god will cause the heavens to rain an infinite supply of saltwater down to the earth.’
Once this ludicrous knowledge sunk in, Hana wanted it back out again.
‘That’s all well and absurd,’ she said, feeling nauseous from the odd mixture of fright and amusement, ‘but why pick Henri, of all people?’
‘Convenience. His grandparents live in an isolated area outside of the city, allowing the lobsters much time to prepare for his arrival. And, of course, nobody would be able to hear him scream.’
‘How do you know all this?’
The cat let out a miaow of mild laughter. ‘Let’s just say I’m a very curious king,’ it said.
Hana started shaking. ‘But how . . . How can I save him?’
‘Ah, my plan is simple, and my plan is thus: create a lobster god and trick the lobsters into leaving Henri alone.’
‘You’re mad!’ Hana cried out in frustration. ‘I can’t create a god! Nobody can.’ She felt her hopes being dashed against the cement, dashed by the same paws that had given them to her.
‘That is where you are mistaken, dear Hana,’ the cat king purred. ‘You may be the only person capable of doing such a thing. Yes, I am fat, but I am also fat with knowledge: legend speaks of a great man from long ago, a man named Daniel Druff who sailed to this land on a boat made from his own dry flakes and founded this city. His power to make things out of dandruff was kept a secret from all he knew – all, that is, with the exception of his cat. It was this cat who passed on the legend, told to cat children and sung of in cat bars, and we have paid close attention to his line of blood, his trail of dandruff. And you, Hana, are the direct descendant of this hero long forgotten in the human world, a hero from whom you have received a most miraculous gift. Given the proper training, you could recreate the world in dandruff. Surely a mock god is within your ability.’
‘This is too much,’ Hana said to herself in a daze. Then she remembered Henri and immediately snapped back to reality, however fragile a reality that was. She spoke directly to the cat: ‘I need training. Please teach me.’
The cat nodded approvingly, its head sliding up and down its body. ‘You are nearly there already. All you need do is stop thinking small and start thinking big.’
‘How big?’
‘As big as a god who could have created all the oceans on the planet.’
‘That sounds big,’ Hana gulped.
‘Correct. It is four times the size of a regular lobster.’
She tried not to laugh – if the cat was referring to a fully grown lobster then that would be fairly large, but still not nearly as large as she expected.
‘Only the actual size is not significant,’ continued the cat. ‘You must make the lobster as majestic as a sea god can be, covered from head to toe in seashells and other fine aquatic jewellery. It must have a commanding presence.’
Hana gave it some thought. ‘Will the lobsters notice their god is completely white?’
The cat shook its head, or a close approximation to it. ‘The fools already believe it to be. Now, I have provided you with some books for reference material. You must begin training for the mission ahead with due haste; as you train I shall divulge the remainder of my plan.’
The cat clicked its claws and the lobster climbed out of its tub. Hana watched as the lobster took a string into its claw and pulled it, dragging an open crate towards her. Peering in, she saw that it was half-filled with books, most of them about lobsters. One book in particular caught her eye.
‘Why is there a car mechanics book in here?’
‘Because a car made out of dandruff is faster than a dandruff bicycle,’ the cat answered.
‘You expect me to make – and drive – a car made out of my own dandruff?’ Hana was more incredulous than she had ever been before. ‘You just nonchalantly toss that in there after making such a huge deal over a somewhat large lobster? Did you seriously think I wouldn’t notice?’
But the cat was unaffected by this outburst. ‘It is the only way for you to make it in time without resorting to learning how to drive a real car and stealing one. Like Daniel Druff you have the ability to create a vehicle out of dandruff that can move under its own power. I suggest you harness and master this ability if you wish to save your friend’s life.’
Hana thought back to the very first thing she had made out of her dandruff, a spaceship that had hovered and flew, and she knew that the cat king was right.
‘How much time do I have?’ she asked.
‘Until the sun sets.’
That would give her enough time, if she concentrated. After all, she only ever did her homework or studied for a test the night before it was necessary. She sat cross-legged on the clean cement and flipped through the book while pulling the necessary parts from her head; the alley was wide enough that she could construct a car for one person.
As she built the dandruffmobile, the cat divulged the rest of his plan as he had promised. She would drive up to the cottage but park the car out of view. Then she would set up the lobster god at the front door, circle around the cottage until she saw the lobsters through a window, most likely still fattening Henri, and tap at the glass to gain their attention. Once their attention was gained, Hana would race back to the front door and knock as loudly as she could in order to summon the lobsters, at which point she would hide somewhere and play a recording of the cat king speaking as the lobster god. The recording would essentially tell the lobsters that their god is now sick of human sacrifices.
Hana thought it was a splendid plan, one that would do away with the lobsters without giving away her secret to Henri. The only thing she had left to wonder about was what had been done with his grandparents.
‘They are tied up in the basement, unconscious,’ the cat told her.
The mental image this conjured for Hana was enough to break her heart. She worked on constructing the car even faster than before, and soon enough the great work was finished, a solid dandruffmobile that could perfectly seat her. But now she had something new to wonder about.
‘Um, so how do we get this out of here?’ she asked as she scratched her head, causing stray flakes to clutter the once-clean cement.
‘Lobsters are stronger than they look,’ the cat said enigmatically.
At that the lobster tied a string around the car, scurried up the wall, and heaved the dandruffmobile up towards the alley’s only opening. Hana winced every time the dandruffmobile bounced against a wall, but miraculously it managed to maintain its structural integrity and soon disappeared out of view.
‘And now for the grand finale,’ Hana declared. She poured over the various diagrams and texts on lobster anatomy until she felt comfortable enough to blow it up to obscene proportions. Brought into reality, the lobster god was larger than she thought it would be, taking up more space than the dandruffmobile and barely fitting in the alley.
‘I won’t be able to bring it with me,’ she realised aloud.
‘Yes, this was expected,’ the cat explained. ‘It is merely practice for the real thing. You will have to recreate it when you reach the cottage.’
‘Does it look believable?’
‘It will look believable for the amount of time it needs to. Now, I have already recorded my message for the lobsters. If you look at the very bottom of the box you will find a recorder with a speaker. You will need to place these inside of the false lobster god and press the Play button before knocking on the door. I have placed twenty seconds of silence at the beginning of the tape, which should be the amount of time it takes for the lobsters to reach and open the door. Take them.’
Hana pushed around some books until she found a yellow tape recorder with a black speaker and gathered them up into her hands.
‘Now you are ready,’ the cat said approvingly.
‘Thank you, sir, for all of your help. But before I leave, may I ask your name?’
The cat smirked. ‘I have no name; I am merely the way king.’
Thinking it proper, Hana curtsied to the king before climbing out of its domain. She looked down around her for the lobster and the dandruff car and found them on a small road to the side of one of the buildings; Hana slid down the hill of artificial turf on her heels and ran around the building to join them. The lobster snapped its claws in greeting and produced a card which read LUCK. Then it hastily grabbed another card as though it had forgotten something, and this card read GOOD. Hana thanked the lobster and got into the musty-smelling car, which immediately began speeding in the direction of Henri’s grandparents’ cottage. There was no glass in the windows and she could feel the wind full on her face.
The dandruffmobile managed to avoid heavy traffic and police cars by taking only side streets, at the very worst eliciting stares by bewildered pedestrians and motorists. Hana did not even care if anyone she knew recognised her. The car soared out of the city and into the surrounding country, going so fast that various parts of it started to peel off. Soon she could make out the lake where the cottage was located. The sky was developing a pinkish hue and she swallowed hard in her worry.
When the car veered off the road and headed directly for a tree, Hana found herself kicking out the side door and rolling onto the grass, counting all of the potential bruises as her knee hit a rock, her head slammed against a patch of grass, and so on. She rose from a ditch and looked to see that her fear had been well-founded: the car was gone and in its place was a mound of white flakes surrounding the tree like artificial snow wrapped around a Christmas tree. She breathed a heavy sigh of relief. She surveyed her surroundings, spotted the cottage by the lake and ran towards it, refusing to let her limping leg slow her down.
The area surrounding the cottage was peaceful, with chirping birds and trees sometimes swaying in the wind; nobody would have been able to suspect what was happening inside the cottage, not even someone with a very good imagination. Hana set to work on the lobster god as soon as she arrived at the cottage, putting it together at the side with darkened windows so she would not be seen by the cottage’s temporary inhabitants. The god came along nicely, with the recorder placed in an open cavity and oceanic jewellery decorating its exterior. She dragged her creation out to the cottage’s front porch and leaned it against two chairs so the lobsters would have to look up at it, adding to its majesty.
Wiping the sweat from her brow, Hana looked upwards and saw that the sky’s pink had joined with a shade of orange. She circled the cottage, peering into each window she passed until she came across Henri and the lobsters. The lobsters were dressed in his grandparents’ clothes, far too many sizes too big for them, and wore large, wobbly grey wigs; Hana wondered how Henri could possibly have been tricked by these ludicrously-dressed impostors.
In the corner she spotted an obnoxiously large pot of boiling water, while Henri was sitting at a table covered in fatty foods like burgers and sausages and sandwiches made out of butter, seemingly forcing himself to eat them so as not to disappoint his grandparents. It was at this moment more than any other that Hana realised how utterly absurd it was that the lobsters could believe a day’s worth of eating would be enough to satisfactorily plump up poor Henri. She tapped at the window.
The lobsters immediately stopped what they were doing and looked in her direction, just as she ducked out of view. She scurried back to the front porch, knocked loudly on the front door until her knuckles hurt, and then pressed the Play button on the tape recorder before filling in the cavity with more dandruff. This last step accomplished, Hana lunged behind some bushes and waited anxiously for the lobsters to appear.
The front door opened just as the cat king’s voice – or rather the lobster god’s – played from the hidden speaker. The lobsters stared up at their god in awe.
‘Item number one,’ the lobster god boomed, ‘is to clean out the litter box. The lobster sometimes forgets it due to its lack of smell. We cannot have our kingdom reeking of excrement.
‘Item number two: have the throne cleaned. Too many food stains are spoiling its pink surface.
‘Item number three . . .’
Hana struck her forehead with the palm of her hand. The cat had accidentally given her its to-do list!
‘Item number four: scour the lake for fresh fish. I cannot go long without fresh fish.’
After this last item there was a period of silence, and Hana was nearly in tears at the plan’s failure. But then she heard wild chittering and poked her head out the side of the hedge to see what was happening: the lobsters were stripping off their clothes and wigs and bounding off the porch. They landed on the grass and skittered towards the lake as though their tails were on fire.
Hana’s open-mouthed shock turned into a wide smile and she fell backwards to the soft grass behind her, holding her sides as she giggled uncontrollably. The cat may have accidentally given her its to-do list but the lobsters were dumb enough to follow it; nothing could have been more perfect.
Remembering Henri’s real grandparents, she pushed herself off the grass and raced up the front steps of the cottage, nearly tripping over the lobster god as she entered the building. She dashed past a stunned and overwhelmingly full Henri and bounced down the stairs leading to the basement, where she found his grandparents lying unconscious on a carpet, their feet and hands tied up and white cloths stuffed into their mouths. First she pulled out the cloths to help them breathe, then she untied their feet and hands, and once they were freed of the lobsters’ trappings she performed all the forms of resuscitation she knew of until they regained their senses. She collapsed beside them, out of breath.
‘Where am I?’ Henri’s grandfather asked, looking around. ‘Oh, I know.’
‘All I remember is we were going to cook some lobsters,’ Henri’s grandmother said, rubbing her sore wrists. ‘Then after that, nothing.’
Henri’s grandfather helped up his wife. ‘Now, why is Henri’s little friend on the floor?’
‘It might be the same reason we were on the floor,’ Henri’s grandmother conjectured.
‘A gas leak?’
Henri’s grandmother shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of it happening before.’
‘But never to us!’ Henri’s grandfather said angrily. ‘I’ll call the gas people right away.’
Hana had her eyes closed through all of this but was still awake; she was simply too exhausted to move or speak. Truly, she would have fallen asleep right then and there if not for the sudden mental image of Henri and his grandparents stepping outside to find a giant lobster made entirely out of dandruff. She shot right up, giving Henri’s grandparents a start, and soared up the stairs, pushing past a speechless Henri – speechless because he still had food in his mouth – and leaping out the front door. Slamming the door shut behind her, she used her sudden surge of energy to step on and tear apart the lobster, eviscerating it and tossing the tape recorder. She did not rest until all of the dandruff flakes had fallen through the cracks in the porch.
When she did rest, it was in a rasping, throbbing heap on one of the porch chairs, her eyes slowly blinking out over the lake until she fell asleep.
When she woke up, she was lying on top of the bed in the cottage’s guest room. Henri was sitting in a chair beside her, arms crossed, looking over her battered body until his eyes met hers.
‘So I take it something interesting happened,’ Henri said.
‘Yeah,’ Hana said. ‘I woke up when I thought I never would again.’
She told him about everything that had happened and was going to happen – excluding the bits involving her dandruff, of course –, and Henri listened attentively, not once losing his cool demeanour. Then at the end of it all he smiled.
‘You’re a very strong person,’ he said admiringly.
‘And you’re a very dumb one for being tricked by lobsters,’ Hana said. ‘Is it all right if I use your grandparents’ phone to call my family and James? I’ll have to let them know where I am. I think James’ll be more surprised than my family.’
‘Go right ahead,’ Henri told her. ‘My grandparents won’t mind. Do you need something to drink? There’s a glass of water on the table there.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome. You know, I found this tape player outside. Do you think it was left by the lobsters?’
‘It was left by one of them,’ Hana said.
Henri handed her the glass of water and then set up the tape player and its speaker on the table. Right before he was about to press the Play button, however, Hana asked him to flip the tape over; if no one had pressed Stop before Henri found the tape recorder then it would have reached the end of the side by now. Henri flipped the tape and then pressed Play. After approximately twenty seconds of silence a booming voice appeared:
‘Good evening, gentlemen. I am your lobster god. I have come here today to tell you that I have grown weary of these human sacrifices and would rather have acrobatics performed in my honour . . .’
To Be Continued In Episode Four: In the Arms of Vindaloo
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Episode 15
Volume 2
Purchase the Book