Content warning: sexual assault.

His hands are everywhere, squeezing your shoulders, pinning your arms, grabbing your ass and smashing you against his clammy body so close you feel all his hearts beating beating beating, and you gasp and you say Mr. Mollusk, what—but he’s covering your mouth, your eyes, you can’t move can’t see but you smell, you taste, stench of clams on his breath, tang of brine on his tongue, turn away but he yanks back your head, no, try not to gag, you’ve never liked seafood, or the sea, a bottomless murk hiding things that will topple you, drag you down, you thought you’d bob above it all, safe in your just-say-no boat but there’s so much you don’t understand, a different world populated with cold-blooded triple-hearted aliens that squeeze through cracks and hide in bespoke-suited plain sight and grow back limbs they shed when escaping, and they always escape, don’t they,

wait, he’s your parents’ best friend for god’s sake, Mr. Mollusk on the terrace with a shrimp on a stick and a hey-how-about-a-summer-job, isn’t that nice, oh he’s so nice, something’s burning and your dad hops up to check the grill and your mom hisses say thank you, pull down your shirt, behave yourself, and you know what she’s thinking but this won’t be like last summer behind the counter at Ben & Jerry’s with your friends draped like seaweed over the tables and after your shift that college boy, his mouth a barnacle on yours until your mom pulled up and honked and you shoved him away, laughing, but now,

but now Mr. Mollusk doesn’t care that you’re shoving, you’re sobbing, no, he’s biting your neck and you’re weakening, the surface so far above, wave goodbye to your parents and say thank you and he’s slithering into your mouth, no, prying apart your legs, all the soft moist dank cold salt-steeped parts of him, and that stench, putrid shrimp and something burning, how many arms does this man have,

and the phone rings on your desk, you should get that, it’s your job, your summer job, so nice, it’s ringing, right there yet unreachable, ringing, bobbing, behave, if only you were stronger, louder, if only you had more arms more hearts more sense, if only you knew how to swim, no, if only there was something you could grab hold of, a skewer a stick a pencil, a pencil, that pencil right there right here right—yes.

Didi Wood’s stories appear in SmokeLong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Fractured Lit, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best Small Fictions. More at didiwood.com.