“Feast your eyes on Sim,” Laina would joke over dinner with the family as she pulled out a photo of a lobster from her wallet — the joke being that it wasn’t a picture of a boyfriend or kids. Laina was a wildlife documentarian famous for filming the deaths of an assortment of wildlife — and she was just as adept at watching her own relationships die, her uncle often teased, eliciting laughter from the whole table.
She wasn’t too picky, she was simply weird — that’s what the men would tell her and that’s what kept her in at night. She told herself it didn’t matter, not when she was the only videographer to watch the rare African jumping scorpion, the brown striped tiger, and even the “immortal” cockroach naturally live out their lives on camera until that fateful day they were struck down by the hand of God. Her most recent obsession was to get intimately close video of a rare breed of lobster dying of natural causes. Her parents wanted her to be happy, which meant having nice things — nicer than a lobster.
Rumour in the crustacean kingdom was that one lobster in particular that researchers had been following for sixty-seven years — named Sim — was the one to watch. He had been known to dodge predators and was tagged with a black skull so fishermen knew not to touch the elderly creature.
Sim had a much more personal struggle he worried about: the thought he would continue to live forever alone. All the young lobster lassies would come around for a romp with the famous lobster. Eventually the ladies would leave him for younger lobsters — ones that shaved and knew what sexting was. Laina’s obnoxiously bright camera light never helped, revealing Sim’s aging face and scaring the girls back online to dating sites like Plenty of Lobster. If it wasn’t the light it was Laina’s constant Grim Reaper shadow looming over him day in and day out, waiting for him to die.
Frustrated, Sim would look up at her and scream, “You horrible bitch! Leave me alone! I can’t take any more of you and your fucking camera!”
Laina would look down and see his little mouth bubbling and say, “Fascinating.”
With forced bonding time, Sim grew to tolerate her obsessive ways, her need for schedule, her attention to detail and lust for regiment. It contrasted with his one-night stands, loose-end ways, and the trail of lobster ladies from his rock-lobster past he’d left in the sand. He had seen the world change and missed those red-hot wild women. Maybe it wasn’t them changing, he thought, maybe he was just getting older. Laina knew it was a combination of both, but telling him wouldn’t be good for her movie.
When Laina wasn’t working, she was watching horrible reality television. She would sit on the three-person couch alone in the middle, watching shows about love, never getting what they all got. In some ways she was lucky and friends would tell her, “What we’ve got, you don’t fucking want.” But she did, or at least she thought she did, but found it harder and harder to believe, especially after that last bout of chlamydia. Now that she’d succumbed to bitterness, all she wanted to prove was that everything dies alone.
Sim’s dating life improved the day he met his rose. Her name was Thorn and she was just that. Thorn was youngish, a bit rough around the edges — a lobster Neil Young might have sung about. Sim truly believed she would stay and she did, longer than the others but not forever, or till death, which he was starting to believe he would never see.
Thorn would turn to him and say, “Oh imperishable you! You’ll never leave me, will you?” She never intended it to be a question because she knew he would always be there. He had to; he was apparently immortal. Sim would always respond, “I will always be with you, my love. I have to be.”
“Then I’ll be with you forever — but because I want to be, ” Thorn would reply and then wink, and oh, how Sim thought she was wild.
When she had got everything she needed from the relationship and he thought things were getting started, she left.
He longed for Thorn to return, and Laina could see it through the camera but never felt it, just filmed it. Every single moment. He couldn’t shed a tear in the middle of the night without Laina and her camera being there because her prior engagements of nothing never got in the way.
A week later, Sim stopped moving while Laina was filming him behind a rock. She peered into his beady black eyes, the part that held his soul, and asked, “Did you leave me?” Sim didn’t respond.
She poked him in one eye, accidentally crushing it, even hearing an odd popping sound under the water. Sim did not move. A small bubble came out of his mouth, and Laina set up a camera beside him and one above him for a better angle.
She stuck her gloved finger right up his butt in hopes of shocking him back to life. Though she thought she felt a clench, Sim still didn’t move.
As he died, nothing spectacular occurred. He didn’t burst into a ball of fire with smoke and stars flying out of his claws. Nor did she capture his soul rising out of his lifeless body. Sim lay there on the cold ocean floor he’d walked on for 167 years, motionless, while the camera ran. An hour passed and the tape ran out. Laina went home that night and watched TV.
Laina would frequently visit the spot where Sim had died, and soon all that was left was a lobster-shaped hole in the ground where Sim had sunk into the ocean floor. A few years later, a new species of mole lobsters emerged and Laina, still alone, couldn’t wait to watch one die.
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