> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Carcinization - URL: https://www.ceteramagazine.com/carcinization/ - Published: 2026-09-03T13:05:03.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-03T13:05:03.000Z - Description: A woman travels 10,000 years to find her missing lover. Instead, she finds crabs. - Author: Danielle Wilfand - Tags: speculative fiction, Literary speculative fiction, disability fiction ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/media/2026/09/carc_final_thumb.png) Carcinization 0:00 /2016.1960997732426 1× > ***Content warning: This story contains depictions of ableist treatment, chronic illness and disability, and sexual content*** Malachai, did you know that 10,000 years in the future, everything turns into crabs? The people are crabs, the dogs they walk, crabs. I’m watching one being walked now just outside my window, its leash looping around each of its eight stubby crab legs. The buildings have become crabs too, concave carapaces, expanding out widthwise like how the skyscrapers of Manhattan once towered upwards. Do you remember that lecture we had halfway through second semester biology? The one where the professor drew a crab on the blackboard in shaky chalk strokes as he explained the process of convergent evolution. How nature had attempted over and over again to evolve everything into a crab. How it might again try to evolve everything into a crab. The Great Carcinization, he called it. That was the only time all semester you stayed awake for a whole lecture. I don’t know how I feel about everything eventually turning into crabs. I never particularly liked crabs, but I don’t hate them either. When we ordered sushi from Aunt Mai’s, I never got the California roll or the spicy kani roll. The first time I tried crab was that summer we went to that seafood place in Chelsea Market. I forget what it was called. We sat on the wooden barstools at the long counter, peered into the giant tanks behind, brimming with Dungeness crabs and Maine lobsters, their legs clicking against the glass. The woman behind the counter brought out a whole Alaskan King Crab, its body shining like a ruby. You showed me how to crack open the claws, the back, the tail to reveal the pale meat. Chelsea Market is underwater now. Buried somewhere underneath layers of silt and sediment. The Carcinoids found parts of the seafood market we went to. A fractured portion of the black granite countertop, its edges worn smooth, and the remnants of one of those large glass tanks. There was one lobster still in it, fused with the bottom of the glass, fossilized underneath the weight of the ocean. Forever captured in time. They brought everything they found back to the museum archive and laid the nets out, still dripping seawater. Hemania helps me pluck the smaller artifacts out of the nets and organize them into piles. I’ve never seen Hemania look so excited. Her claws move so fast, half a plate slips through them and shatters against the floor. One pile is entirely forks bent out of shape, another a bouquet of tarnished spoons. Hemania asks me to identify each one. She can’t accept that they are all used for the same thing. The Carcinoids have one utensil, the urp, and one eating dish, the urth, and both are much simpler in appearance. The noise attracts the other archivists, and they crane their heads over their desks. They are not interested in the artifacts. They are staring at me. I keep my head down, eyes focused on the strands of net in my hands. That’s when I see it, a speck of gold interlaced with a strand of seaweed. A small heart-shaped pendant. Thousands of years ago, my initials were carved into it. I know it was mine, but it looks so alien on the museum floor it might as well have come from Mars. I forgot I lost it that day at Chelsea. With all that had happened since. It probably got snagged on something when I got up to use the bathroom. I knocked over my plate, and it shattered on the floor (I thought it was too early to be a sign, but was it?). You laughed at me, always clumsy. It’s bad luck, you said, to break a plate on a Friday. Or something like that. (A few days after we went to Chelsea, that summer so long ago, a fortune teller stopped me while I was wandering Pier 35\. I wanted to ask her if she could divine the location of my lost necklace, but she grabbed my hands and whispered something about how deja vu isn’t a brain glitch, but our consciousness slipping forward in time. Quantum mechanics, leaps, something, something. I didn’t believe her then, but now I’m not so sure. This felt like what she was describing but the opposite. My consciousness slipping back in time while my body remains physically here. Time traveler’s jamais vu. When I turned to leave, the fortune teller tried to sell me a string of jade beads for $50\. She claimed they would grant me twenty years’ worth of good fortune if I wore them every day. Maybe I should’ve bought them. Where are you, Malachai?) --- My days here are filled with a wide expanse of silence. The Carcinoid language is in a frequency not audible to the human ear. When I take the subway (it is now truly a sub-way—part submarine, part train, connecting the terrestrial portion of the city to the subterranean portion) to work in the mornings, I see them standing together in clusters. They look like they are whispering. Probably about me. Their lips move, but no sound comes out. --- I watch Franke-with-an-E enter the employee mess hall for weeks while I eat in deafening silence. He is the archive’s cataloger. He normally sits by himself at a desk in the corner, takes my artifact identification reports orally, and hammers away on what looks like a Morse code typewriter. A single large button configured for crab claws, pressed at various frequencies and intervals. He usually sits by himself in the mess hall as well. Near the window. He pretends he is in an aquarium, looks out at the fish swimming by. A striped bass, a bluefish, a glimpse of squid. He eats a forkful of seaweed salad, his eyes wander across the cafeteria hall and meet mine. I don’t know what comes over me that day. It’s not like me, you know it’s not like me. I pick up my tray and slide onto the bench across from him. This is a precarious endeavor because the benches have a series of curved contours, five feet wide, as long as a human-sized crab shell. My drink spills across the table, leaving a translucent, shiny patch. I am swallowed into the divot across from him, so only half my face peeks over the table. But I have accomplished my objective. Now, not speaking to me has become the more awkward alternative. “My name is Yara.” I break the silence, extending my hand out to him before quickly retracting it. Shaking hands is not a common greeting in the Carcinoid world. The Carcinoids don’t have hands to shake. “My name is Franke. With an E,” he says, then, noting my confused expression, “Not to be confused with Franc-with-a-C.” His pronunciation is precise, but his voice is airy in a way human voices are not. Unlike the other Carcinoids, who are mostly shades of crimson, Franke-with-an-E’s shell is a deep blue color, like an Atlantic blue crab. When he moves his claws, there is a shock of cyan blue on the posterior aspects of his limbs. “Why are so many of you named Franke/Franc?” I say, laughing. Franke-with-an-E doesn’t laugh. “Our names are not Franke/Franc. My name is made of sounds you cannot pronounce. Those were just the names we picked in Human Language class.” I never thought about it before, but the Carcinoids must study English in school like we study Latin or ancient Greek. Dead languages they never expected to hear spoken in real life. Franke-with-an-E lowers his voice, eyes drifting away toward something just over my shoulder. “I hope our names are not offensive to you.” I must have stared at him blankly, because he continued, “We liked how it sounded, the name of your god.” (Later, Hemania told me about Franck Cillion. The billionaire who lived two hundred years after our time, who built an impenetrable bunker underneath the Chrysler building. A fortune teller told him that human civilization would fall within his lifetime, so he gathered his favorite media. The complete Criterion collection, a copy of Moby Dick in every human language. He was a huge Frank Sinatra fan and had his entire library of songs on deluxe vinyls, CDs, cassette tapes. Every form of every Frank Sinatra song. The bunker was so secure that it remained undisturbed for the next 9800 years. Until the Carcinoids penetrated its airtight seal. It became the greatest archaeological find in Carcinoid history. It was how they began to connect the dots of human history. Understandably, they misunderstood a few things.) But in that moment, I nod at Franke-with-an-E, my head empty. “No, I’m not offended.” --- Malachai, did you ever think about what would be left of us, thousands of years after we are gone? If I had to pick a remnant of humanity to survive the apocalypse, it wouldn’t have been a piano. I spilled a glass of orange juice on my mom’s hand-me-down Yamaha when I was eight years old, and it hasn’t sounded the same since. The citric acid still seeps into the notes all these years later. Waterlogged A minors and sour G majors. Hemania takes me to see the piano in secret in the middle of the night. She doesn’t tell me what it is at first. It’s a surprise. She blindfolds me on the way there so I can’t tell the others where it’s at. At first, I protest, but she says, “They will take it apart.” Her blue eyes are watery, as if the thought alone drives her to tears. “They will split open its shiny black shell, rip out the white teeth one by one…” “Okay,” I say. And let her blindfold me. The museum is built out of Franck Cillion’s old bunker. It has a large space in the middle which houses this month’s main exhibits: a pile of polyester sweaters and a wad of plastic grocery store bags that have yet to decompose. But most of it is snaky passageways and little nooks containing treasures once priced in the millions of dollars, now languishing worthless in forgotten corners. I get dizzy as Hemania twists my shoulders through the paths. Then abruptly we stop, and the blindfold falls away. It’s a Steinway. The blue light streaming through a small window makes a kaleidoscope of waves across its shiny exterior. “Show me how it works.” Hemania steps backward. “I can’t.” The air I inhale feels sharp in my lungs. “I can’t play it anymore.” “Why not?” “There are some things most humans can do that I can’t,” I say, holding out my hands, palms toward the ceiling. “Most humans can move each of their five fingers independently. That’s what allows you to press the keys individually. And press multiple at once.” I try to spread my fingers apart, but they barely move. The collagen has calcified, encasing each joint like a spiderweb wound around a piece of prey. “It’s a condition that runs in my family. My aunt got it when she was about my age. So did my grandmother. It causes the flexible cartilage of the small joints in your hands and feet to become hard and calcified like bone.” Hemania tilts her head slightly. “I just assumed all humans were like you.” It feels like there is a bird caught beneath my rib cage, its wings fluttering. I don’t know if I want to know the answer, but I have to ask. “Has another human ever traveled through here?” Hemania pauses before answering. Her blue eyes are strangely human, but they are endlessly deep, and I cannot read them. “No, you’re the first one. There are no records of any others in our histories or the histories of those who came before.” --- I don’t know where you are, Malachai. If you crash-land two thousand years ahead of me, or somewhere so deep in the past, any trace of you is lost to history. I found the time machine plans crumpled in the back of your desk drawer. These were the coordinates you used. But I noticed an error in your calculations on page 37\. You didn’t integrate the Lagrangian properly over the correct variable. I fixed it. I was always slightly better at math than you. Slightly. Franke-with-an-E tells me that moving through time is an illusion. Like how a tendril of seaweed appears green or the sea appears blue. Neither are those colors in their essence. If you pulled them apart, unlinked their DNA piece by piece, analyzed each gene fragment, you wouldn’t find it hidden in there. The color is just how we perceive light hitting an object. A thing that has mass in this universe. Time is the same. It is just our way of processing the laws of the universe. In that way, we aren’t actually that far apart. It makes sense, but it doesn’t if you think about it too hard. That we exist simultaneously at every point in time. It’s like you haven’t moved; you are in the same place you always were. It is everything around you that has changed. One moment, you are standing in your apartment, staring out at a New York City alleyway, oozing black trash bags and cooing pigeons and rats the size of your head. The next, you are underwater, the air crushed from your lungs, darkness closing in all around you. Then suddenly, giant red claws embrace you. They are warm and gentle, and they are lifting you. And everything has turned into crabs. Anyway, I’ll wait here for you. --- I want to believe you landed somewhere far upstream from here. Where the humans that have evolved into crabs have evolved into something else. Maybe everything has reverted to primordial soup, a hot slurry of single-celled archaea and amino acids. You’re the only one left, sitting in a silent world. Then one day you uncover these letters like the Carcinoids found Franck Cillion’s bunker, and you will remember me and know that I came looking for you. Until then, this journal can serve as documentation of the Carcinoid people. Of their ways, their culture. --- The Carcinoids celebrate the new year on the first full moon of the winter season. When a thin layer of frost has crept over the edges of the ocean. It never gets cold enough for the subterranean city to completely freeze over, but it’s enough to stop the subway from running. The museum is closed, so Hemania hosts a New Year’s dinner for all the archivists at her home in the ’burbs. Franke meets me in the lobby of my apartment complex. It turns out he lives two buildings over from me, in a top-floor unit overlooking the water. We wait for the land train at the station, our breaths escaping as puffs of mist. We glance at each other awkwardly. Somewhere along the way, he has shed Franke-with-an-E and become Franke. The traditional Carcinoid New Year’s dinner is a four-course meal. First, a seafood stew is served. A small pot is delivered to each Carcinoid sitting around the table. It is green in color, a mix of clams, mussels, and oysters. My hands slide into the divots made for crab claws, and I take a sip at the same time as everyone else. Next, a song is sung as a blessing for the new year. At first, it is too high a frequency for me to hear. Then it descends. A low rumble, then a hum, the sound comes into focus like a Polaroid photo. A ghostly outline, then shadows, then recognizable shapes. Finally, I can join in. The sound vibrates in my chest. The second course is a roast of some kind. It will be another thirty minutes until it is ready, so everyone leaves the table to gather in small cliques around the hearth. Franke snakes his way through the crowd to get us some drinks. Everything has gone silent again. The only one who doesn’t have a group (besides me) is Hemania. It is her party, but she is alone. She is looking out the window at something I can’t see. I slip in beside her. She turns to me and looks like she wants to say something. “If you are able to repair the time machine,” she whispers, so that I can barely hear her, “I want you to take me with you. To the Anthropocene.” “The human era… it’s really different from this one,” I say, picking up one of the urps lying on the dining table. “See this here. How it curves around your claws so you can hold it. How it stays in place without you having to grip it with fingers? Humans are obsessed with fingers. It’s one of our key attributes. Everything requires them. You wouldn’t even be able to eat most human meals properly.” You also wouldn’t be able to walk through a vertical human door comfortably or fit in a car or a train. Humans would stare at you in the streets. They would point and laugh at you. You couldn’t go anywhere. You wouldn’t be able to eat at a dinner party like this. And neither would I, for that matter. (When was the last time I went out to dinner? It was with you, probably. Three months ago, at Antonio’s, I believe?) *Antonio’s is always booked out on Saturday nights. The tables are packed in so closely it feels like all the oxygen in the room is being used up. If I stick my elbow out too far, I’ll bump into a Supreme sweatshirt or a Chanel bag that costs more than my rent.* *A waiter has brought out our main course after a 40-minute wait, but the plates in front of us are untouched.* *“Do you need help?” you ask.* *“No,” I say, a little too loudly. The fork slips from between my deadened fingers and clatters to the ground. The woman at the table next to us glances in our direction. She is wearing a sequined cocktail dress, her eyeliner drawn to a fine point. She smells of tangerines and cigarettes.* *A waiter materializes out of thin air to place another next to my plate. I pick up the fork, but the same thing happens. Clang! And again. In the restaurant kitchen, there is a pile of forks in the prep sink. Each one is unused, spotless, save for a few strands of lint and wool carpet fiber strangled around the teeth.* *“Yara.” Your voice is strained, the sound a little too curt. “Maybe we should take the food to go.”* *You gesture at my untouched lasagna, the cheese congealing on my plate in globs.* *“I don’t want to take it to go.” I grit my teeth. “I want to eat here.” Clang. We’ve caught the attention of the entire restaurant. They stare. Their gazes are red-hot pokers. The waiter materializes again. His face is scrunched into a grimace. He doesn’t know what to say.* *You turn to him. “Can we get two to-go boxes?”* *“Malachai,” I feel my cheeks grow hot. “I said—”* *I move to grab your hand, but my arm flails to the side. My still-full wine glass topples over and shatters. The red soaks through the Chantilly lace tablecloth, through my gray sweater, spreading, consuming. As if it were fire.* --- Malachai, I know you will probably never read this. I miss the taste of mangoes, of all things. And bread. I wonder if I will ever see another human, who is not also a crab, ever again. They look like crabs but more parts of them are human than you would think. What parts are crab and what parts are human? Or are the crab parts the human parts now? Perhaps it is me who is no longer human. Parts of me have already begun to change. --- Carcinoid lovemaking is a lot like human lovemaking, and at the same time, they are nothing alike at all. They do it standing up sometimes, but more often lying down. First, the female Carcinoid must shed her hard shell, her exoskeleton. Must become vulnerable and soft. At first, we do not touch each other for what feels like an infinite amount of time. Franke and I sit across from each other on the cool stone floor of his apartment. “Can you feel this?” I say. I run my hand against the back of his shell. It is smooth and cool like glazed pottery. It’s the first time I have touched one of their shells. “We have nerve receptors in our shells. They are part of us. We can feel pain, and pressure, crude and light touch,” he reaches out to touch me, but stops. “You can tell me to stop if it’s hurting you.” “How do I know that what Carcinoids call pain is the same as the pain that I feel?” He frowns. “How do you know that the way someone feels anything is the same as what you feel?” He takes my hands in his claws. They have rough nodules inside, like little teeth. They are sharp if brushed from the wrong angle. Afterward, I am lying in his bed and there’s a soft ringing in my ears, crisscrossed scrapes on the insides of my arms. My thighs are rubbed red and raw, but they don’t hurt. When I shower, the hot water doesn’t sting. At the end, you’ll know you should feel dirtier than you do. You should feel like you broke an ancient law, violated something sacred. But you don’t, because you don’t know who’s less human, the Carcinoids or you. --- That night, I dream of you. It’s a dream I’ve had over and over again these last few months. It always takes place somewhere different. One time, I’m at the grocery store. Another time, I’m at a college party. We are talking to a few of your friends, Kathy from upper division differential equations, and John, who lives two floors down, when it happens. One of my teeth is loose. I reach inside my mouth, and it comes out, root and all. This seems to unleash something and another one comes loose. Then another. Sometimes they break apart and come out as shards. I have to pick them out of my gums, piece by piece, like broken glass. It feels so real. How am I supposed to eat toffee, or apples, or doughy New York bagels ever again? Then I wake up with my hands shoved inside my mouth, fumbling for my teeth. Making sure they are still there. In this dream, I’m in our apartment on that last night. You came home drunk, breath smelling like something aged, something expensive from an upscale Manhattan bar. I hadn’t left the apartment in almost two weeks. I have become well acquainted with the red wine stain hidden underneath the dresser, the dust bunnies in the crevices of the windowsill. They have lived there for years, have stayed the same. But everything has changed. “You could always go out, you know.” You know I can’t. “I don’t like how they look at me.” “You could be brave. Jaqueline is brave; she was diagnosed with cancer. She goes out.” “People don’t stare at Jaqueline.” She doesn’t drop things. “I don’t know what you want me to be.” I know what I am. I am like the wine stain. A bitter aftertaste. “Even if I time-traveled to the future and found a cure for you. Even if I went through all that trouble, would anything really change?” I don’t know if anything would. Then I reach into my mouth, and an incisor comes out. Then a molar. I hold them in my palms, speckles of bone and blood. You don’t react. The dream begins to fade. One last time, I feel the ghost of a finger tracing the edge of my lips, the soft touch of a palm. The warmth of human skin. My nostrils are filled with the scent of our apartment. For a moment, I almost believe it is the summer day we went swimming at Long Island beach and hung our swimsuits up to dry on the fire escape. My lips still taste of ocean salt like you were just there. Like I was just there. But as I lie in bed, head spinning, body settling back to Earth, I can feel it evaporating. The tastes, the smells, all of it. No matter what I do, it’s slipping through my fingers. Inevitable. Like how the last rays of the sunset are swallowed by the sea. *I thought you would come back for me.* --- I can’t remember if it’s the first or the fifth time I stay over when he says it. When I’m slipping out of bed, ready to leave. “A male Carcinoid will take many mates. Many times. Over the course of years. But a female Carcinoid will take a mate only once during a short window of her life. Then never again.” At first, I say nothing. I don’t know what to say to something like that. It’s different from our usual arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes after dinner. Or who left the takeout box out on the counter instead of putting it in the fridge. “But I am not a Carcinoid.” It comes out like a sigh. “You left a few pages of your journal on my typewriter.” He takes me apart with his eyes. “You love someone else.” I pull on a jacket, slide my feet into rainboots. “He left you. You know that.” His words are like daggers. But I don’t turn around. --- One night, when I lie in bed unable to sleep, my mind becomes untethered from this upstream place in time. It wanders down the strands, combs through the knots that have accumulated. Until I am sitting on the loveseat in our apartment. The one that sits adjacent to the only window that doesn’t look out over the alley, but out at the street. People are walking past. It is summer, and the sidewalks are dotted with baseball hats and sunburned cheeks. That’s when I see it. Two figures walking hand in hand. Everything seems to slow as I watch them. The man is shaped like you. Same dark hair, same gray T-shirt you always used to wear. I can almost see the coffee stain on the hem. It wouldn’t come out no matter how many times I dragged it to the laundromat. His arm is around a woman in a wide-brimmed sunhat. Before I can get a better look, they are swallowed by the crowd. *You never left our time. Did you?* It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. All of you are long dead, bodies reduced to dust. No less than dust. Atomized. Now part of other things. Maybe a string of seaweed, or algae, floating peacefully on an ancient lake somewhere. Somewhere fossilized under a thousand layers of silt and stone, there is an empty apartment down a shitty Lower East Side street. It holds a single strand of my permineralized hair tangled in the fibers of an antique rug, my smell still lingering in its vacant corners. *You left me in my darkness.* *I found the way out on my own.* --- A few days pass, and I can’t keep taking time off work. I take the subway to the museum later than usual, so it’s strangely empty. Peaceful. Some silences are more pleasant than others. When I get to the museum, something guides my feet through the network of winding passageways. Past the bottlenecks and sharp turns. I know where they are going. I find Hemania there. She is kneeling on the ground in front of the piano, her crab legs folded underneath her. Her eyes are closed. At first, I think she is sleeping, but she nods when I walk in. “How’s Franke-with-an-E?” she asks. “Oh, we broke up,” I say awkwardly. “We kept fighting over who was going to do the dishes.” “I’m sorry,” she says. “No, it was kind of nice in a way. To have an argument about something dumb like that. We just weren’t compatible. That was it.” I shuffle my feet on the stone floor. It is my turn to hesitate. “Do you want to hear one in real life?” I say. “There are professionals who play piano in my time. They hold performances in giant concert halls. There are other instruments too; sometimes they all play together. Sometimes, the sounds are so beautiful, it’s almost as if you can taste them.” Hemania looks up. “But what you said about the human world, I don’t know if that will work. If I could do any of the things I want to do there. If they would accept me…” “Well, if I can figure out a way to live in the Carcinoid world,” I say, “I’m sure we can figure out something back in the human world. For both of us.” Maybe I can fix the time machine. I think I know how. Maybe I’ll see you again. Then I can tell you myself: Guess what, Malachai? One day, you’re going to turn into a giant crab and so will I. There will be no such thing as forks or pianos, and none of this will matter because nothing will ever be the same again. --- [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f7/b3/f7b3d002-68ca-4de9-9010-1d89bc125161/content/images/2026/08/24-1.png)](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Danielle Wilfand resides in Denver, Colorado where she is a first-year internal medicine resident at the University of Colorado. She enjoys writing about and examining her experience of living with chronic illness through different lenses. [Leave a one-time tip for the author ](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/#/portal/support) --- ## Editor's Note: Thank you for reading Danielle Wilfand’s “Carcinization.” Given enough time, everything becomes a crab. All right, fine, that's not really true, but it *is* the wonderfully strange joke at the center of this story. And importantly, Wilfand takes that evolutionary oddity and turns it into something so blissfully intimate, using a future populated by Carcinoids to ask what happens when the world changes around a body faster than the body can adapt. Yara is an appealing character in how she's constantly measuring herself against vanished standards. Forks, pianos, crowded restaurants, human hands, and so on. All these ordinary objects acquire enormous emotional weight because they once belonged to a world designed around an outdated idea of how a person should move through it. In the Carcinoid future, those assumptions disappear. Suddenly Yara’s body is simply one body among many, and the inconvenience belongs as much to the environment as to her. This is where the story earns its real tenderness. Hemania can't play the piano because she has claws. Franke experiences touch through a shell. Each encounter swiftly widens Yara’s understanding of what a body can be, while her memories of Malachai reveal how thoroughly shame can become entangled with intimacy. In that way, the title is both a biological term and a philosophy. Everything changes shape. Bodies do. Cities do. Relationships. Even things we consider essential to being human turn out to be temporary. And what truly remains is Yara’s capacity to adjust and keep moving. By the time she imagines returning home with Hemania, the future has stopped looking like the place where humanity disappeared. It's now a life that keeps inventing new ways to fit itself together.—*Jon Negroni* --- ## Support Cetera Paid members get exclusive perks like bonus stories, the ability to comment, and more. Plus you'd be helping us keep the bills paid. You can check out the subscription tiers below, or you can leave a one-time tip if that works better for you. [View subscription tiers](https://www.ceteramagazine.com/its-our-first-week-on-ghost)