The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

MEL KASSEL Crawfather

When Nancy turns fourteen, we tell her about how we fight the crawfather. She doesn’t believe us at first, and we laugh, proud because she’s smart and skeptical, a scientist.

“Careful, Ben,” says Carl, “you raised her to ask questions.”

Ben, Nancy’s dad, holds his hands up: Nothin’ I can do.

We’re gathered in Ben’s cabin, standing in a semicircle around the living-room furniture. Nancy sits in the armchair, knees up to her chest and arms around her shins. Her mother, Irene, sits next to her on one of the wooden chairs we’ve dragged in from the kitchen. Most of us are standing.

Irene is the fulcrum on which Nancy’s trust wobbles. Her mother would never prank her—​Irene loves Nancy so baldly that it overshoots fierce and lands in pitiful. We’ve never seen such doting, such hair-smoothing.

“You don’t have to go to the fight this year,” she tells her daughter. “You don’t have to go until you’re ready.”

“Don’t sugarcoat it!” Judy says. “Carl and I didn’t. The twins started going when they were thirteen.”

Nancy looks ready to cry. It’s a tough talk; we all remember it. There’s no one in your corner. You’re oblivious until the whole family sits you down, tells you a preposterous story, offers you hot cocoa and clucks at your slowness to believe. Judy brags about her twins, but she won’t tell you that when she got the talk, she ran away from home the next day. We found her when a bookstore in Brainerd called.

Now, though, she drives the twins to archery classes twice a week and owns a compound bow herself. She’s the one who hit the crawfather in the eye during the reunion of ’88.

“You guys can’t be serious.” Nancy holds her head in her hands. Irene squeezes her shoulders.

“I’m sorry, sweetie. Everyone goes through this. It’s never easy. We don’t have to talk about it any more tonight.” Judy raises her eyebrows at this, but Ben orders them back down with a glance. Irene continues, “No one is laughing at you, I promise. This is a big deal. We’re telling you about it because we know you’re ready.”

“You’re gonna do great. Brain like yours?” Carl yells.

“Let’s give her some time,” says Ben.

“We’re serious,” says Grandpa Richie. “It’s serious.”

Twenty-two feet at its deepest point, Bluegill Lake has none of the blackness that spells a cold drop. The bottom is right there, layered into three substrates that, according to a PowerPoint briefing Judy conducted a few years back, are classified as sand, pulpy peat, and fibrous peat by the Institute for Fisheries Research.

The lake gets weedy quick, and we make disgusted faces at each other when the slime-slick threads find our ankles. The twins have been reprimanded for telling the younger cousins that the weeds are all the hair that has ever disappeared down shower drains. Still, this year, everyone swims, and everyone jumps from the inflatable blue and yellow trampoline several yards out. Horseflies the size of olives investigate the parts in our hair and leave us fanning the tops of our heads.

There’s a dock at one end of the beach where we toss hunks of bread to bluegills and pumpkinseeds. They swarm at the surface to eat, and the sounds of their bodies slapping against each other are lewd enough to make the adults laugh. Rarely, but often enough to enchant, a pike darts out from the weeds and scatters the school.

“Was that a northern?” the children squeal.

“Oh, I think so,” we say, as though we’re teasing the existence of pixies.

The lake is a horseshoe, and the crawfather lives at the end of the western arm in a cave made of muck. The crawfather is the size of an eighteen-wheeler and about as smart as one. That’s something we always impress on the new fighters—​the crawfather may be huge, but it’s incapable of guile.

We met the crawfather for the first time in the late 1800s. The story goes like this: Great-Grandpa Lawrence built a cabin on Bluegill Lake for the spring and summer, thereby supplementing his earnings as a railroad worker with a bit of money from selling fresh-caught walleye. Like all the Vensons before and after him, he never left Minnesota, and he loved to fish. He knew that he could hook muskies and bluegills without much travel away from the shore, but walleye tastes better, sells better. So, he’d wait for the winds to pick up in the late afternoons, when the water fought itself into prime walleye chop, or he’d head out at night, when he could spot the scuffed-coin shine of their eyes as they fed.

A meticulous man, he aimed to grid out the entire lake and rank the squares on the map by their generosity toward anglers. He was working on the left arm of the lake when the crawfather took him.

The description of his death varies depending on which of us tells the tale. Squeamish Madeline doesn’t linger on the tentpole legs, the churning mouthparts, the pincers that shoot blasts of wind when they snap together. She only says that the crawfather killed Great-Grandpa Lawrence, and that his wife, Bertha, had to borrow a rowboat and wheeze her way onto the lake to find the culprit, its carapace bloodied, its antennae still tapping through scraps of Lawrence’s clothes.

Grandpa Richie’s version is even more terse. “You’ve seen crawdad skins, washed up on the beach? Little buggers that’ll pinch you if you find ’em alive? Well, this one can pinch you in half at your belly button, and that’s what happened to your great-grandpa when he crossed it, out on his boat just trying to make his living. And it got more of us after that. Your Grandma Tess. Ollie.”

These days it’s Irene who embellishes, who makes a sermon of it. “Like any big animal, it’s dangerous because it’s stupid and it’s strong,” she tells Nancy. “Your Great-Grandfather Lawrence probably thought that he’d found something he could exploit. But when he paddled up to it, it wasn’t curious or godly—​it was just hungry.”

She invites her daughter to ask questions, and she answers as specifically as she can. She tells her to start considering weapons. She half apologizes, half explains for cultivating Nancy’s interest in tennis while dismissing her passion for the flute. She mandates that Nancy keep referring to battle days as “big fishing trips” in the presence of the toddlers.

“Why don’t we just have our reunions somewhere else?” Nancy asks us in the days leading up to the battle. “Why don’t we leave it alone?”

Our responses are no less true for being rehearsed:

Because if we didn’t rent out the cabins, someone else would, and it would only be a matter of time before the crawfather got them.

Because Bluegill Lake should be left beautiful for our children.

Because to abandon it would be to disrespect our dead.

Because it is much too late for that.

Every year, the battling begins on the ninth day of the reunion. This gives those of us who are crafting weapons enough time to whittle, weld, and decorate. It’s not a competition, more like a talent show—​each Venson has a specialty, from Scottie’s pistols to Irma May’s long, tapered spears. We work on them inside Grandpa Richie’s cabin, which is the only space off-limits to the young uninitiated.

On the morning of the ninth day, we meet at the dock and split into three groups: seven of us in the hulking rental pontoon, four in Grandpa Richie’s camo-painted boat with the chugging Evinrude motor, and five in the sleek fiberglass Glastron. We wear windbreakers and grim, set mouths. We lug several six-packs of beer onto the pontoon, alternating them with our forest-green tackle boxes. Some of us even crack a can or a bottle open; it fizzes away at our nerves.

We’re all keeping an eye on Nancy. She’s the newest fighter, and she’s gripping her tennis racket with both hands, ready for the crawfather to erupt from the water at any moment. We’ve told her that’s not how it happens. None of us has ever seen the crawfather swimming or doing anything at a substantial distance from its mudhole. Does she think we’d let the children into the lake if there was any chance of it prowling the bottom?

We leave her be. We think back to our first fights, before we knew the thrill of attacking something together, all of our blood against all of its blood.

The motors roar, then rumble, then buzz. It’s a short ride to the slice of shore where the crawfather lives. The lake is flat and gray, a darker version of the sky, and we make plans to fish later, if we’re all still here.

“Slow, slow,” shouts Grandpa Richie. He flaps one of his arms down repeatedly to signal the other boats. The green line of weed-swept beach thickens as we approach.

“There,” says Hank, the childless accountant. He points at the hole, which is so perfectly circular it looks as though a giant pencil has poked it into the earth. We get closer. Now we can see the crawfather’s bulk crouched near the back. A massive shadow with too many outcroppings, those legs, those pincers. The leading theory among us is that it hibernates the whole year round, waiting in a state of ominous torpor for us to wake it. We’ve read that regular crawdads can do this, shut down their bodies until feeding conditions are favorable.

“Nancy, Nancy,” someone starts chanting. We grin and add more voices to the pile, until we’re the loudest thing on the lake, our fists pumping in the air and our windbreakers swishing in unison. The crawfather doesn’t move. Irene jostles her daughter’s shoulder in encouragement.

“Try it,” she says. She reaches down and picks up a tennis ball. One hemisphere is a mess of spikes, the ends of six-inch nails that we hammered through the fuzz and rubber. It’s half tennis ball, half medieval morning star. We made nine of them.

Nancy takes the first ball from Irene and walks to the rear platform of the pontoon boat. She studies the crawfather in slumber. We know what she’s thinking: Is that thing really going to get up and move?

We’re drifting, but not fast, there’s not enough wind.

“Love–love,” she jokes, uncertain. Then she steps her right foot back, throws the ball straight up, and arcs her racket into a serve so expertly that many of us whistle or curse in admiration.

The racket connects with the smooth side of the ball and sends it screaming toward the crawfather. It doesn’t just hit—​it lodges, right in the V-shaped seam where the crawfather’s head slots into its thorax.

As the crawfather lurches awake, we are ecstatic, cheering, lifting Nancy up on our shoulders.

“Fifteen–love!” says Archie, one of the twins. “Damn, Nancy!”

The crawfather scuttles forward. It doesn’t produce sounds from within itself, has never roared or moaned. Instead, its noises are the awful, wet squeaks of its mouthparts as they slide in too many directions, and the clattering of its legs hitting one another as it walks. There’s also the rasp of sand beneath its abdomen, which hides rows of paddling swimmerets.

Nancy believes. We watch the excitement on her face downturn into fear. But she doesn’t have to worry. We’re grabbing our guns, our spears, our bows, our bottles, our slingshots. We’re lining up at the prows of our three boats, Vikings baring our chests at the dragon, emboldened by the neon-green tennis ball set deep in the beast’s hide. We haven’t rallied like this since Judy nicked its eye with her arrow.

“Fire!” Grandpa Richie shouts, and we do.

The crawfather waves its antennae, suddenly caught in a hailstorm of miscellany. A ninja star strikes, scars, and spins off its carapace. Rocks of various sizes bounce against it with the sound of popcorn kernels hitting the bottom of a saucepan. Arrows launched from Judy and the twins’ bows splinter. Bullets either glance and zoom off at odd angles, or pierce but don’t reach the true meat. Every year, we are struck by how invincible it seems. It is a monstrous wall, an unpeelable fruit.

“We’re barely doing anything!” Nancy says, dismayed and childlike, her tennis balls now mostly landing in the water.

“Keep at it!” we say.

The crawfather brings its pincers in front of its head, shielding itself and still coming at us, its legs rising and falling in chitinous waves.

“You son of a bitch!” we cry. Those of us in the motorboats turn in slow-motion terror as we realize it’s heading for the pontoon.

“Get off the boat!”

“Swim here!”

Scottie aims for the softer bits between its tail plates, but Sarah tackles him into the water before he can shoot, and their son Ernest follows. Irene grabs Nancy’s hand and they, too, jump from one of the pontoon’s swollen flanks. Madeline and her fiancé, Brad, can’t reach the sides in time. They try to cower beneath the driver’s dash, but the lower sickle of the crawfather’s right pincer finds Madeline’s leg and drags her from Brad’s arms. She screams, Brad screams. Blood tip-taps politely atop the boat’s canvas awning.

“Madeline!” we call, over and over. We yell so that we won’t have to hear the crawfather eating, a delicate and probing process that we can’t stand to watch. We pray that the crawfather clipped her femoral artery when he lifted her aloft. We pray that it eats her headfirst.

Brad reverses the pontoon boat, sobbing. We lift those of us who are treading water into the motorboats, crowding them so that they sit low in the lake.

We’re out of ammo for the day. We can only bob like helpless, tear-streaked corks as the crawfather retreats backward into its hole, clutching its prize.

Dinner at the grown-ups’ table that night is strained.

“They won’t believe another boating accident,” says Winnifred. Once, she’d gone through a four-year phase during which she didn’t participate in the fight, citing the fact that the crawfather had to be some kind of ancient nature-spirit. But she’s been back with us for a decade since then.

“Hunting accident?” Irma May proposes.

“Kidnapping,” Hank says.

Nancy says nothing. She sculpts her potatoes into a mountain and hollows a hole into one side with her butter knife.

“She got cold feet before the wedding and ran off.” Grandpa Richie settles the matter. “Sorry, son.”

Brad nods, then shakes his head, then won’t stop shaking his head. “I wasn’t . . . I’m not even married to her. We didn’t get married. I’m not part of this.”

“Brad,” we say, cautiously.

“I never wanted to—”

“Hey,” we cut him off. Some of us get up and put our hands on his shoulders. We comfort him, and we keep him in his chair. He’s seen the crawfather now.

“Maybe change your name in her honor,” Hank suggests, and we nod.

“This means we’ll really get the bastard,” Scottie says, and we murmur in agreement. We move away when we’re sure that Brad has refocused. We make sure he has enough food. We know to watch them, after a death, to make sure that they eat and come out of their rooms regularly. It’s the hardest part, seeing one of us go through this. We all think so.

“Does this mean I can bring Carmen next year?” Archie asks. His twin, Nathan, attempts to shush him, but Archie swats his brother’s hands away. “We’ll need the help,” he says.

“That’s enough about it,” Judy snaps.

“She’s the best player on their softball team!” Archie says, and we can tell that this is the card he’s been breathlessly holding, waiting until he’s in front of all of us to play it. Judy’s chair screeches and her silverware falls on her plate as she stands up.

“Archibald,” she says.

“Why not?” Archie asks, and Nancy adds a soft echo: “Yeah, why not?”

“We have had this discussion—” Judy begins, but she doesn’t need to. We chime in, some of us gentle, others stern. They’re in college. They’ve been seeing each other for how long now? Five months? And the photos we’ve seen, her hair, the nose piercing—​well, that doesn’t matter. She’s never folded a nightcrawler over a hook in her life.

“You haven’t told her anything, have you?” Harris the lawyer asks, his eyes flashing to each of us, eager for someone to run with his accusation.

“Fuck, no, you think I would—”

“Do not speak to your family that way—”

“Oh my god, Mom, I’m saying I wouldn’t tell her—”

We have to calm both Archie and Judy down, and then we notice that Brad is crying again, and probably has been crying again for a while. We sneak guilty bites of meatloaf in between his breaths and rack our brains for something new to say.

“Do you want to watch the little ones with Susanne tomorrow?” Grandpa Richie offers, finally. “You don’t have to come out on the boat again.”

Brad wipes his snot on his sleeve. He looks just as liable to collapse as he does to flip the table over. We’ll learn to read him, in time. We study his face.

“No,” he says. “No, I want to be there. I want to hurt that thing.”

We slam our fists on the table. We toast. We arrange for a supply run in the morning. We pace ourselves wisely as we rebuild our rage.

While Carl cleans his rifle, Winnifred double-checks the first-aid kits, and Archie refills the fuel tanks, Nancy readies more tennis balls. We’re worried about her. Her eyes are flinty and she won’t accept our help. Irene says that she was texting and researching crawdad anatomy for much of the night.

“Do you know what a ganglion is?” Irene asks us. “She kept talking about the ganglion.” We shake our heads, but we reassure her that Nancy is just trying to help, in her own way. Privately, we wonder if we’ll have to rein her in a bit.

We find ways to approach her as she works. We bring her lemonade, sit next to her and sigh, tell her that, obviously, this isn’t how the fight goes every year. Most years, in fact, we don’t lose anyone. She ignores us. She hammers nail after nail through the felt.

“Teenagers,” we say to one another. We’ve seen this before. We assume it’s an act of apology when she volunteers to clean the empty beer bottles out of the boats; we ruffle her hair and let her go.

A few minutes later, we hear the Evinrude sputter.

“Is Nancy starting the boat?” Hank asks, and we walk, then jog, then run toward the beach, where we see the widening stripes of the camo motorboat’s wake, the boat itself a brown wedge skating around the lake’s curve.

“Where’s Archie?” Judy yells. “Nathan! Where’s your brother?”

“He was refueling,” we say. “Is he on the boat?”

“They planned this,” Ben says, and he yells for the pontoon boat’s keys. Irene is pale, her fingers gouging into the skin of Ben’s shoulder.

We follow Ben and Irene and Judy and Carl into the two remaining boats, bringing what weapons we can. We move fluidly in our panic. There is no time for quarrels about seating or who will get the first shot. The motors rev and we zoom away from the dock, past the trampoline, around the curve.

The crawfather is already out of its hole, antennae whipping the air. Something crashes against its side, and we realize that Nancy and Archie are throwing beer bottles at it.

“What do they think they’re doing?” we ask each other.

“Why didn’t they wait?”

“Are they crazy?”

“They’re too close to it!”

Scottie readies his gun, but Irene screams at him to stop, not to shoot until we can be sure the children won’t be hit.

Shards of bottles litter the ground around the crawfather’s rust-colored legs, and now that we’re close enough to see them, we can also smell the gasoline. We see the fuel tank, normally stowed under the seat by the tiller, positioned at Archie’s feet. They’d filled the bottles before lobbing them.

“Oh my god,” we say.

We’re forced to slow our approach so that we don’t overshoot their boat. We watch Nancy hold a nail-studded tennis ball above the water, pour fuel from one of the remaining beer bottles on top of it, then balance it on the seat by the bow. Archie nocks an arrow. He painstakingly dips the tip of it into the fuel tank.

“Hold on!” we shout. “Stop!”

Nancy retrieves a lighter from somewhere in the bottom of the boat. She lights Archie’s arrow, then her tennis ball. He calibrates, looses the arrow, and nimbly steps out of her way so that she can complete a graceful underhand stroke with her racket. They both glance back at us to see how much time they have left.

We aren’t looking at them. Instead, we trace the paths of these two small, flaming projectiles as they descend on the crawfather. Both have been launched in high arcs, aim prioritized over speed and force. We will them to fizzle out, to skid harmlessly into sand. Some of us even reach for them. It looks like we are reaching for the kids, but we are reaching for the bombs, and either reach, it turns out, would be useless.

The arrow plants itself in the ground between two of the crawfather’s legs, and the ground suddenly looks as though it’s cracked onto hell. Fire spreads in veins around the crawfather and flares up inside its cave, where they must have pitched more bottles before we caught up with them.

Nancy’s burning tennis ball bounces off the crawfather’s shell like a quick kiss, and then the crawfather is alight. We can hear the heat and pressure build inside its exoskeleton, the whistle of steam released as it cooks. Its tail curls and uncurls in agony. Its legs scramble against the sand, and we think it may be trying to run for water, or for its hole, but it’s blind by now. It drags its pincers along its own back and head, desperate to clean itself of the fire. We watch it stumble and fall onto the beach with a succession of sharp cracking sounds. We smell it: the world’s largest and worst crawfish boil, meat dripping with mud and seaweed and goose shit, all the lake scents that the water buries.

The crawfather burns. We pull our shirt collars over our mouths as our eyes water. We’re in line with the third boat, and we stare at Nancy and Archie. They meet our eyes in defiance. We wonder where their parents went wrong; what we could have done; what we will do.

“That was fucking easy,” Nancy yells. Archie nods.

“You take that boat back right now!” Irene is the first of us to find her voice. “Right now! You turn around and go straight back!”

Nancy squints at her mother, confused. She spreads her hands, palms up: What did I do wrong?

None of us answers. Grandpa Richie has a coughing fit, and we motor in reverse to get out of the smoke. But we don’t turn around. The three boats waver with the chop, shoulder to shoulder, all of them still facing the burning beach. We’re breathing too fast. We nurse a quiet fury that we know is too ludicrous to name. We glare at the middle boat, its bottom bright with tennis balls.

“What?” Archie asks, young and mystified. “What is it? We killed it!”

Our hands are fists, our nails biting our palms. They wouldn’t understand. They thrive on instability and fractures. They can’t let anything be enough. We wipe our foreheads, square our shoulders.

“Let’s just go home,” we say.