Published in Overland Issue 228 Spring 2017 · Uncategorized The Task Eileen Chong after Sharon Olds We fished with lines, not nets. My father came home once and put two shells in my hand. Crabs poked their eyes out, watching to see what I would do. My mother chose crabs at the market. Grey-green armour, impenetrable. The crabs would sit in a basin on the floor of the laundry while my mother pounded spices. I once filled the tub with water. I’d thought they might drown. In the sink, my mother would push aside their legs, locate their underside flaps and stab them with the pointed end of a chopstick. I’d read that you could kill by placing crabs in the freezer. A slow, painless death. It was my task to unwrap the string from the dead ones. My father would prise off their top shells, remove the gills, and rinse out the guts. My mother would quarter each with a cleaver. When the crabs arrived at the table, swimming in sauce, my father would reassemble his. Lift the carapace. I liked breaking off the legs, snapping the joints and easing out the flesh in one intact sliver. Biting the meat off the cartilage in a single pull. I left the claws to the others, preferring only what I could mine through my own precise undoings. Read the rest of Overland 228 If you enjoyed this poem, buy the issue Or subscribe and receive four outstanding issues for a year Eileen Chong Eileen Chong is an Australian poet. She is the author of nine books. We Speak of Flowers is forthcoming from UQP in 2025. Website: www.eileenchong.com.au More by Eileen Chong › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 27 September 2024 · Poetry Because a wind blazes Dženana Vucic Because after autumn there are / other autumns, / we learn to eat the wind. / This is what we shall do / with all our anger. 25 September 2024 · Art The desire of others: on the struggle around the building of ATSIAGA in Alice Springs Kathryn Gilbey and Beth Sometimes There is an older chapter to the originating mythology of this saga that has been obscured. We write to register these ghosts in the architecture and alert a farther-afield readership to the latest wave of grassroots protest happening now.