First I Took the Lobster’s Heart
- Mar 6, 2020
- 4 min read
by Isabelle Correa
When Dave the genie appeared, yes, I was confused that he was a slightly translucent overweight truck driver, but I knew what I wanted because I had always known what I wanted, and yes I knew the wording is always how they get you, meaning you have to state your wish just right, which is in part why I took my time, tried to figure him out, so I said to him, Dave, it’s a pleasure but I wasn’t actually expecting you to materialize after jokingly rubbing this souvenir seashell I pocketed from the gift shop my mom had dragged me into and frankly I thought the blue of you would run a little deeper than this jumpsuit you’re sporting, but Dave wasn’t having it—what’ll it be kid, what’ll it be—as if he was taking my order for strawberry or blueberry waffles, and when I tried to ask him what a genie like him was doing in a vacation town like this, the top destination for rednecks on their honeymoon and families too poor or too tired to make it down to California, he said I’d better hurry up and state my demands before he went and poof’d off to a better place, so I said it as straight as I could, I said I wish to be anything but this, I wish to be all things, I wish to be everyone (I’d always felt that being just one person is a punishment from a god I refuse to believe in and I’d always wanted to eat up everything and everyone and steal every word and trinket that I could in order to make my life the vastest, biggest, fullest life possible (but of course I didn’t explain this to Dave on the account of his impatience)) and Dave didn’t hesitate to fulfill—alright, I got one for you: every time you kiss someone on the mouth you’ll grow another heart, their heart, and you’ll become more and more and whatnot, per your request, darling—and of course I tried to check out the mechanics of this before the deal was sealed (does this substantially increase my risk for cardiovascular disease? where will the extra heart fit?) but Dave just pulled a coffee mug from thin air, took a gulp, and moaned—you want me to float around explaining magic to you as if I’ve got nowhere else to be? Nah, kid you’ll be fine—and what I was going to say was that I’m not a kid or a darling, I’m an adult who just happens to be stealing seashells and is still being dragged around by my mother because my mother is recently widowed and I’m actually a halfway decent daughter capable of pity, but he poof’d off as he had promised, leaving behind a definite smell of motor oil, stale coffee, and the savory musk of ramen powder, leaving me there on the ugly Washington coast, watching seagulls fighting over french fries next to a person in a lobster costume waving a sign for a Senior Citizen Sizzling Discount, looking for who to put my mouth on, so yes, first I took the lobster’s heart, and yes I asked for a kiss and he obliged, taking off his head with bulging black eyes and wrapping his plush claws around me, and it didn’t take long to realize why Dave hadn’t turned me into a shape shifter or something of the sort, because shape was not what I had asked for, I had asked for this, for the intricacies of another being, and I got it, my chest growing, I became more—I had a new affinity for first-shooter video games and a new fear of chickens, I loved his grandmother, I mourned her recent passing, I knew all the words and dance moves to “Hit Me Baby One More Time”—then I grabbed a middle-aged mother on her way in for lunch and dipped her as deep as I could, her children’s mouths agape, their kite-shaped balloons released into the sky where real kites belong—this heart was spread open like a warm blanket, I loved my children to the point of pain, I had a secret passion for beetles, something about their scurrying had comforted me as a child when the world felt loud and complicated—and no, I couldn’t stop myself, my three hearts pounded for more and more and I ran inside the restaurant, too crazed and addicted to think of asking for permission, kissing the souls out of mouths still buttery with seafood—I was ashamed, I was a florist, I was a thousand miles from home, I had a foot fetish, I had a fetish for people who performed arguments in the shower, I had a fetish for fetishes, I hated astrology, I swore by it, I loved Jesus, the devil, Buddha, my siblings, DMT, my dog, I felt death happen in my new hearts a dozen times but I also felt birth and beginnings and silly hopes, like the hope that tomorrow I would be better, the hope that I deserved a love purer than the love I was capable of giving, that I could be, should be, that I am—then someone tackled me to the ground and held me there as the police were called and the room grew tense with the beating of our now tangled hearts, and while I waited for them to take me, I thought, yes, there’s always a catch, and I sobbed enormous tears, as big and full as I had always dreamed they could be.
Isabelle Correa is a teacher in Vietnam. Her work has appeared in Third Point Press and is forthcoming in Pank. She lives for a good chat. Find her on Twitter @IsabelleJCorrea.
