The Baby Lobster
By Derville Quigley
Listen to a reading of this piece by Derville:
When you come off the metro it’s an unassumingly long walk to the office. My laptop bag was sliding off my shoulder. I tried to adjust the strap and when I looked down, I couldn’t believe the sight of a small red lobster on the pavement below. Its pincers waved up at me. Gosh, it was just baby. I felt the little fella’s pain. I was Elliot, it was E.T. I had to get it home. There was a way you could pick them up without getting pinched, but I wasn’t sure how. So, I used the sleeve of my cardigan, and hot-footed down the bank of the canal and threw it in.
Plop! I felt better. I’d made a fellow sentient being happy.
“They’re not native,” echoed a voice on the approach.
I recognised her from accounts.
“The seagulls eat them. Let them.”
I was late. My morning team talk was in full swing.
“You think you’re doing some kind of good, but you’re not.”
I wanted to ask her where she bought her moral compass. But also, why she cared?
Later, lying on the floor of the disabled toilet, I tried to make sense of it all. I found out it was a crayfish. We all make mistakes, besides I had bigger fish to fry—a research innovation sprint followed by a compulsory online refresher all before noon.
At lunch I looked up at the seagulls. Those birds unnerve me. I’ve seen them dive down into chip wrappers. I always think the red mark on the tip of their beaks looks like blood or ketchup.
I spend twenty-four minutes looking up different types of crayfish and came across an article. Its headline read: Local councils call for help in eradicating destructive American crayfish. Procambarus clarkii. I ask Google, ‘Do seagulls feel regret?’
Derville Quigley is a writer from county Monaghan, Ireland based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her poems and short stories have been published in The Ogham Stone, Trasna, Hidden Peak Press, Roi Fainéant, Beyond Words, Hooghly Review, CommuterLit and Litro among others. She placed second in Litro's Surreal and Strange Prose Poetry Contest 2022 and 2nd runner up in the Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award 2024. Selected to attend the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School at Queens University Belfast, she is also co-founder of Strange Birds a writing feedback community.