Dungeness

*2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest Runner-up

My grandmother pokes at the crab bathing in a half-inch of sink water. “They tried to sell me one that was missing a claw! The nerve of that man.” Popo gloats with distaste. “I’m not senile yet!”

I grab a chopstick from the drying rack to mock and taunt the crab into grabbing the bamboo with its claw. When it does, the crab uses the chopstick to lever itself out of the tub. Gong Gong finds me in a tug-of-war with a two-pound crustacean.

“Lay gao meh-ah!” He chuckles as the crab begins to take the upper hand. Then he wraps his hand around its hind legs and drags it onto the scarred chopping board. He holds the knife out to me. “I showed you last time. Now you try.”

I test the weight of Popo’s cleaver in my right hand as I try to remember Gong Gong’s instructions from three months ago. The crab and I stare each other down, and it clacks its pincers menacingly. I want to detach the claws first, but I’m supposed to wash the crab. I eye the bottle of Dial liquid hand soap.

“Grab the legs like I just did,” Gong Gong instructs me. “Push off the top shell.”

“Shouldn’t I kill it first?”

“It’ll be dead before it hits the wok.”

I hold the crab over the sink and lean into it as I push at the shell. CRACK! Legs thrashing, pincers gnashing, nerves frying. The top shell rattles in the sink like a drunken bottle cap.

“Good girl.”

My first compliment from Gong Gong in years, and he drops it on me during what he considers housewife training. My family has deluded themselves into believing that if they teach me how to cook, it means I won’t end up a gu po.

“This is really chaan yun,” I say.

“Cruel?” he shrugs. “Just tear the gills off and clean the guts.”

As I rinse off the body, I’m grateful crabs don’t bleed. “Can I do the claws first?” When he nods, I take the knife and aim the blade at the soft junction between leg and body. I swing.

I miss. Gong Gong laughs, “Ha! Lay gum mo yong-ah! So useless!” I hand him the knife. In one fluid motion, he amputates the crab. “You try again.”

I lift the blade, thinking of all the women before me who have used this cleaver. It lands weakly on leg shell. My great-grandmother neglected to pass down her precision. I try again and hit the soft spot but not hard enough to separate limb from body. As a child who used to trail behind Popo in the kitchen, I’m surprised the blade is not as lethal as it looks.

“Paat ha kuuy.”

I hit the dull top of the blade with the palm of my hand, twice. I clench my fist and try it again, but it hurts. Gong Gong reaches over to give it a solid paat, and CRUNCH!

“Now remove the pek-pek and the mouth.”

I angle the tip of the blade under the triangular flap on the under-side and sever it. Did I just castrate a crab? I flip it over and remove the mandibles. Decapitation is less satisfying without a neck.

“Use the steel wool sponge to chaat the dirt from the shell. Get between the joints.”

While I do that, he scoops the yellow sludge from inside the cara-pace, the top shell. “Your Popo loves to eat this with her rice,” he tells me.

I amputate the rest of the legs from the body and paat them with the flat of the knife to crack the shell enough so that the juices will seep in as it cooks. I cut the soft body down the middle, exposing white meat. Gong Gong shows me how to cut one of the halves into quarters. I finish the remaining half.

Behind us, my brother grunts with the conviction of a heavyweight champion as he lifts a...