Here's something I wrote a little bit ago for a friend of mine. She ended up loving it and calling herself Bobbie Blade. It's not completely polished and a little rough but I hope you enjoy.
Bobbie Blade and The Mantis Shrimp
Grey and translucent it lay there on the cutting board in the kitchen of a corporate-ran restaurant. Bobbie Blade's hair was pulled back wet with a recent prison-grade perm wrapped around her cranium with a little sprouting plume not quite atop her crown. She snatched the cold wet crustacean by rote and motor. Grab, and do, and next shrimp. Short fingers, heavy-knuckled, fat, and strong all at once. The meat jerked and tore as the thin exoskeleton was removed and discarded with savage indifference.
Lips pursed, eyes narrowed, another kitchen employee watched. Esporanza looked away. Paying attention to Bobbie was a trap within itself. Like a monkey wrench in the machine, if you noticed it then you were obligated to try and fix the mess, or you reported it. Esporanza did neither. Esporanza walked toward the employee boombox and turned it up. She liked this song. It was a popular pop singer. It made her hips want to move. Bobbie peeled more shrimp.
Eyes were off of Bobbie. She noticed, reached into the front of her pants underneath the strap of her crusty boxers, and revealed a cassette tape. The year was 2014. She made her way to the boombox and inserted the tape. Snoop Dog played.
"Yeah boi! Sippin' on Gin and juice, yo!" She announced.
No one liked her, and someone turned the music off. Bobbie brandished a knife.
After the talk with numerous members of the management team and several present witnesses, she was allowed to continue her employment. She was angry, offended, but overall happy that she got to keep her job. She didn't like the work, but Bobbie was from the streets. Houston, L.A., Detroit, Harlem, St. Louis, Rio, Johannesburg South Africa, you name it. She was surprisingly well-travelled and equally surprisingly uncultured.
"Yo, I actually likes de-peelin' skrimp fo' y'all!" She ended the sentence in "y'all" instead of yo." That was something to the management team.
"No more hookn' fo' me. Dis bitch got moufs ta feed, yo!" The managers were disappointed in the immediate reappearance of the word 'yo' in her vocabulary, but not as much as they would be if she had stabbed them. They knew that, or at least, they felt comfortable believing that it could have been worse further confronting Bobbie. Bobbie Blade, the employee you didn't talk to, or try to decipher her blood-alcohol content, and you certainly didn't dictate a drug screening. She was trouble and asking questions was asking for more. The managers decided not to press things and continue to pretend that she wasn't a part of their lives.
The next day Bobbie's 19 children were in her 1-bedroom apartment, and the 42 possible fathers stayed away under numerous rooves in a multitude of states and 8 possible different countries. Bobbie was peeling shrimp. She didn't like her job, and it wasn't better money than street fighting. She was good at street fighting, and she had been even better at hooking. She thought about that, shrimp after shrimp. She missed the vague fear and excitement in her clients' faces. Her torn fishnets had hugged tight as she told them her specialties: The Windmill, The Spine Shocker, The Coup de Grace, and her most treasured and reserved for only the highest paying clients or worst of enemies, The Blade Storm. Each name ambiguously erogenous or lethal, and it was up to her to decide which context within to perform. Just as each had acquired its name in radically different circumstances. She peeled, not to peel but because once she discovered via her powers of observation that no one was interested to know or care or even look at her, but that she could steal a pound of shrimp home each day. It satisfied some maternal instinct. 'Monkeys be liftin' each other's shit to feed they young all the time, yo.' She assured herself. She trudged to the cooler for another bag and saw something bright. There was something chromatic and angry within the heavy plastic sweating bag. She clawed and dug and almost had a hold of it when it squirmed.
"Thassa big skrimp, yo!" No one heard her.
"I'm gawnta pawn dat muthafucka!" She felt it was marginally less important to add 'yo' at the end of sentences when no one was present.
Bobbie went home. Her oldest was named Margaret. She didn't like that name or remember naming her child that but she didn't argue with the paperwork.
The other kids were sitting around on the floor in their underwear. Margaret was a 14 year old boy; the oldest and the bravest. He watched Bobbie fill an ex-hamster habitat with salt water she had stolen from Petsmart. "Mom?"
"Go ta sleep, yo!"
"But what is that?" Margaret spoke with his most curious and sweet tone of voice. Bobbie wondered why this kid never slept.
She brandished her blade. "Don't be steppin', yo!"
Margaret looked defeated.
"I gotta install this filtration system so da oxygen gets in good, yo!"
Margaret gave some pointers, Bobbie yelled and threatened and brandished and the boy was instrumental in putting the aquarium together.
The tank lit up and there was a plunk. The angsty plated little bastard was swimming free in his new home. Bobbie became offended when she realized another entity was living rent-free in her apartment. This new creature was exuberant, domineering even. Bobbie didn't like it at all. "I'ma pawn dat shit, or I'ma peel and eat his ass, yo!"
It stopped swimming, stopped rejoicing. It watched her as if it had heard her. Bobbie looked back and she was confronted with something she didn't understand, yet understood too well. She had been a tramp, a street-walker, a drunk, and insane her entire life. Something spoke to a visceral and primal part of her. The shrimp stared back, challenging her. Neither her nor it missed a beat.
"I'ma pawn yo ass, yo!" The shrimp's sinister and emphatic eyes set apart remained fixed atop its head. The pupils scanned and split into one, two, three pupils. It beheld a bright riveting spectrum, to black and white waves, to infrared all rotating at different degrees and dividing like chaos dissected into reason. It calculated and computed one Bobbie Blade.
"Mom?"
"Go ta sleep, yo! Deeyum boi!"
Margaret retired, but Bobbie couldn't. The staring match was back on. She had spent all day peeling this little bastard's cousins and he didn't seem to know or care. Bobbie didn't let up. She sat there in her dingy taupe-colored apartment with a big ghetto mirror in the den all illuminated with the glow of her new crappy salt-water tank. This wigger-ass crab muthafucka wasn't getting tired. That made her madder which helped to keep her awake, but she could see where the fight was going.
Bobbie walked up to the tank, revealed her blade, and proceeded to intimidate sealife in captivity. It stared back until Bobbie felt something coming. There was something miniscule at first that began to rival her own anger. The fluid gathered within the thin carapace of the shrimp just as some feeling built up in Bobbie. There was a loud click as the shrimp punched against glass.
Bobbie recoiled. "OH HELL NAH!"
Bobbie and the shrimp punched the aquarium wall. Two boney-michrophone-shaped drumstick appendages rocketed at the speed of a 22 caliber bullet towards Bobbie's undisciplined hooker knuckles. On the water-side of the aquarium water boiled, a vacuum formed, and time and space tore as a crazed wigger fist sailed through glass and water. The two fists made contact. Bobbie rheeled and landed on her back as her head thudded against the carpet. The other children didn't say anything.
The sun peeked through the dust covered blinds of the apartment. Snoop Dog played, and Bobbie opened her eyes. That day she peeled shrimp as normal, but something was different. Her breasts had swelled well through her A-cup bra into the size of double-D.
"Fuck ass sheeit, I must be pregnant again!"
Bobbie knew that wasn't it. Her money-makers had never been big enough to make her any money, so she hadn't been with anyone recently. The manager approached, but Bobbie was too distracted by her own chest to pick up on the idea that she was being admonished.
The manager had hired a new shrimp-peeler. He built his case methodically, and she listened to none of it. She only heard key words such as, "disrespectful," "detrimental," "insubordinate," and a bunch of other words that Bobbie didn't know. Enough key words triggered her attention to the fact that she was losing her job and she watched him. She watched him in her most unfavorite state, that of being vulnerable. His eyes went from hers to her chest and back. He couldn't help staring and she couldn't stop thinking about how many less 'fried skrimp' she was going to be able to have. The bosom swelled. The manager didn't seem scared, confused, or alarmed. He just kept staring. His beady little eyes in their pompous skull swam into the valley of her dirty pillows and beyond. The shirt grew tighter and Bobbie's joints tingled. He said she was fired. The pressure under her shirt released followed by a loud shudder.
Dust swirled in the air, probably asbestos or plaster or something, and she was standing up and very still. Her breasts had shrunk back to their normal state and she felt a little better. Her shirt wasn't as tight. She liked that because she didn't want to buy new clothes. Clothes costed money. The wall behind her manager was caved in with the six-pronged wheeled-foot of her boss's chair pointing straight at her. She couldn't see the general manager's face because his entire head was too deeply implanted into the building, but, she knew two things. A.) Some shit had happened, and B) her boss was most definitely probably dead.
Inspiration and Information:
The article that inspired my story:
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/shrimp-packs-punch
An entertaining and informative video about the mantis shrimp
