The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

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.