My wife thinks I’ve changed a lot. I think she is beautiful and kind like a princess and I always have. She used to feel tenderly for me but she says I am not the man she married. Sometimes she walks in on me while I am brushing my teeth, or putting my hands in the lobster tank and she looks at me like I’m crazy. She puts her hands in the lobster tank across from me, not looking up, and I remember our first date, her at a table across from me, me not looking up. I was shy.

She was the girl everybody wanted because she had such soft hair and such a brilliant disposition, I was the nerdy computer science boy nobody wanted because I was nerdy and a computer science boy. I was going to make AI, and she said that I was going to kill fiction, that I had blood on my hands. Now I have red paint on my hands, I think to myself. I smile a little bit and I wonder if I should tell her this funny little irony I’ve just thought up. She sees me smile and is not amused. We go back to focusing.

Just before I left Silicon Valley, the lobsters started killing themselves. They are immortal, as I understand it. Or at least they can live forever in an abstract and distant sense. With the onslaught of modern technology, lobsters became upset. They worried that their ancient ways would be used for evil, and they communicated in a language made up of particles of fat passed from one lobster’s eyestalks to the next. It started on the coasts, spread across the equators, dead lobsters floating upstream, their clacking shells bumping into each other long into the night.

My beautiful wife insists I am a changeling, like the ones fairies trade for human babies when they are not able to have kids. A changeling, like a lobster, sheds its entire exoskeleton at full growth, and is physically indistinguishable from the man she married. No, that's not right. Anyway, in order to prove to her that I cared about fiction as well as lobsters, I left Silicon Valley and now am elbow deep in our lobster tank, my hands painted red, the tips of my index and ring fingers together, my middle finger bent resting on top of them, my thumb and pinkie crawling vaguely, their toothpick legs dragging at their sides.

We are teaching the lobsters dialectical behavioral therapy through a process developed by the government. Silicon Valley said let the lobsters die, we literally have no use for their ancient ways, and we never said we did. I said, see? This is not my fault, nor that of Silicon Valley. My wife said, if you really loved me you would leave your job, your stupid job, and you would help me save everything. And I really love her. The process is as follows: red hands, googly eyes, toothpick hind legs, get in position, enter the government provided lobster tank, elbow deep. Use your false eyestalks to pass the fat particles of dialectical behavioral therapy their way. It’s really fairly simple. My wife is unconvinced that I even care at all. She says that I am doing this to manipulate her, probably. That for all she knows, I’m working with Silicon Valley and the fat particles on my false eyestalks are not the ones on hers, that mine are propaganda or poison. We trade eyestalks.

It’s hard to tell whether the lobsters in the tank want to die. Of course they are thrown out of their element, and things amongst lobsters must be tense in lieu of recent rising death rates, so I hope my hand-lobster is a calming and tranquil presence. My hand-lobster, I imagine, teaches them a guided meditation, maybe leads an active mindset course. My wife’s hand-lobster, across the tank from me, seems remiss. Her face betrays nothing, if not the sense that my hand-lobster is a sort of self aggrandizing holier-than-thou kind of lobster. The blue lighting in our lobster room makes her eyes glow like she is magic. Her hand-lobster’s toothpick legs seem animated by their concise steps. Her hand-lobster moves like a gentle deer, her false eyestalks like sweet antlers bobbing in the cool water. My hand-lobster makes its way to hers, slowly, so as not to alert the real lobsters. She looks up at me as our hand-lobsters graze each other, their eyestalks brushing just a little. It’s in times like these, dire ones, when you have to love the ones you love. No reservations held. She says to me, your eyestalks are drooping, what’s wrong? I say, they’re heavier because of all the poison. She looks angry, but I’m smiling, so she smiles. She pushes her head at me because her hands are lobsters. I push my head back at her because I am the man she married. Now our hand-lobsters jitter about, confusing the other lobsters, but that’s okay. I love the one I love.