In case you were wondering, I still have the lobsters — the ones I ordered for a romantic dinner from the back of The New Yorker, from back when we were dating. They came wrapped in seaweed and the Portland Press Herald, in a heavy brown box that said "Live Maine Lobsters" on the side, a box dented and dandruffed with wax.

I told you about them in the hospital, the Live Maine Lobsters, which I had meant as a surprise, and I apologized that I wouldn't be able to steam them up with drawn butter and chewy French bread, and in the spaces between the morphine and the physical therapy and the uncomfortably erotic catheterizations, I told you that they were probably dying on my doorstep even then, tilted into the crusty snow eight thousand feet above the ocean waves.

I was there for a week, a week of pain waking me, of doctors putting me under. I knew you were there, three days and nights on that shiny green foldout, and then I knew that you weren't for five days and nights more, but I thank you for driving me home — a prickly package of bandages and Percocet, four fractured vertebrae and a hematoma that swelled out of my lumbar like a purple-green parody of pregnancy. You said goodbye with a kiss I could not lean in for, and I kicked the cardboard coffin onto the carpet inside.

In time, though, the Live Maine Lobsters revived, and began clacking over the linoleum beside the dishwasher, and curling up on the carpet under the coffee table, skittering to the shower when they heard the water run. I snipped away their rubber manacles and let them live off the crumbs that fell around my electric-lift recliner, crusts of cold pizza and ham-and-cheese sandwiches and chicken pot pies. At night, their antennae gave cold caresses to feet slick in compression hose and black from where the blood had pooled, until I pushed them away with the crook of my cane.

They grew until they were the size of corgis. They knocked over lamps, and chewed up area rugs, made soggy nests of magazines behind the cushions of the sofa, so I moved them to the basement, which had always been damp anyway.

I am married now, and we have three children. Sometimes after dinner when we're watching TV, they ask me what's in the basement, and I smile and say, "Daddy things," and they go back to their iPads. I double-check the knob on my way to the kitchen.

Some nights, when I know they are asleep, I roll up my pants and take the first two stairs into the basement, and I let the gray-green water lap over my feet. I toss in the mojo-spiced carcasses of rotisserie chickens and frozen packages of country-style ribs, and I watch their great shadows glide to where the bones sink. They are bigger now, massive even, large like sedans left to rust in the bottom of an abandoned quarry.

Some nights, like tonight, I take off my clothes and hang them on the handrail below the light switch, and I inch myself off the landing. I float with my face to the moldy ceiling, bobbing in the waves that the Live Maine Lobsters carve in their basement abyss. I hear the clacking of their claws, feel their antennae — hollow as reeds — on my legs, my feet, my once-broken back.

The water is deep, and it is dark, and it is so very, very cold.


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