Range Shift
The ghost crab army marches at night. The faster the army travels, the fewer legs they need. Each crab needs eight legs to walk. Six to jog. Four to sprint.
They communicate. They clack and bang their claws on the sand. They stridulate their legs like grasshoppers. They growl by grinding the teeth in their stomachs.
The ghost crab army travels at ten miles per hour. At dawn, they dig deep holes on the beach, angled towards the onshore, cooling breeze. They wick water through leg hairs to wet their gills because they cannot swim. To lay eggs, the females must float upside down in the crash of surf. Many drown.
The ghost crab army begins in Brazil but as mystified biologists watch and fret, the crustaceans skitter along the shorelines of two continents. They capture more territory. They reach Rhode Island, eat piping plover eggs to the dismay of local birders. The crabs overwinter in their burrows. Four feet below the surface, absorbing water too salty to freeze.
They do this for years, largely unnoticed by New England beachgoers, emerging only after dark. They have settled into the high intertidal zone, and so biologists are puzzled when one spring the ghost crab army turns from the shore and heads north, deep into the Ocean State.
Ghost crabs emerge in unlikely places. A small girl finds a pair of stalked eyes peeping around a jar of canned rhubarb in her granny’s dug cellar. A snapping claw yanks a gardener’s glove when she reaches under a pile of winter-fallen oak leaves to prepare the soil for radish seeds. A consortium of claw-clicking decapods scuttle down a sidewalk in Providence, scattering a crowd of economics majors from Brown. Miles from the ocean, the ghost crab army trades bits of clam and tidal wrack for slick earthworms and cicada nymphs.
Preschoolers gather crabs from beneath playground slides, line them up to race. Bored apartment-dwellers capture a few and create forbidden terrariums in buildings with strict no-pet policies. Teenagers sneak up and deposit crabs in each other’s hair, victims screaming at the dry scratch of claws. Homeowners distressed by holes in their lawns try kerosene and naphthalene mothballs. Poets write sonnets about ghost crabs recognizing themselves in mirrors. Speeding trucks crush carapaces, often on purpose. Local news anchors ask whether you can eat the crabs (unclear but too small to be worth the bother), and how to protect your heirloom tomatoes (pots sheathed in chicken wire are the best solution, but there are no guarantees). Everyone enjoys complaining about crab fanatics, who get ghost crab tattoos and wear ghost crab t-shirts and start unironic ghost crab cult bands.
The ghost crab army is around until the first frost, and then as one they vanish. The few left behind in captivity wither and die, despite all the best efforts of their loving captors. Everyone assumes the wild crabs have similarly met their demise, clicked shut their flash-white sandpaper claws for good. Most everyone is relieved, except the groupies and the preschoolers who found in the crabs a perfect match for their own bewilderment towards this alien, inscrutable world.
But the ghost crabs aren’t gone. They find each other underground, where the soil stays warm. They are no longer solitary creatures, but an aggregate. They dig enormous caverns just below the surface of the state. They are small, but infinitely many. The ground holds until spring when, thawing, it begins to open beneath the pressure of human feet, the weight of cars and buildings. People fall so far, and the ghost crab army grinds their stomach teeth.
Sarah Starr Murphy
Sarah Starr Murphy’s writing has appeared in River Styx, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. One of her stories was listed as a special mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She’s managing editor for The Forge Literary Magazine and eternally at work on a novel.