*
Body dreamed that she had become the crabs in the bucket, not even one of the individual crabs, not the bucket, but the whole complex. They climbed on each other and ate each other's flesh, the way crabs do, so that it was in a sense a single creature living out a nightmare.
The way the man put it -- he was a man of wisdom, at least in this case, and speaking about his own neighborhood -- if you wanted to help the other crabs get out of the bucket, first you had to get out yourself, you couldn't even be just close to getting out yourself because, if you looked back, somebody else would pull you back to the bottom. So the most altruistic, the most Christian thing you could do was, first, get yourself out. Body prayed for discernment -- what do I do now, daddy? -- and the answer seemed to be: First look to yourself.
So now she was one of them, a piece of darkness climbing out and the others were pulling her back into the bucket. Standing in the world of freedom, Soul looked down on Body and held his nose: Look how low you've fallen! And if she'd let him, and if he'd been able to make himself touch her, he might well have put her back in the bucket where he felt she belonged. But she kept herself out of his reach, a cunning little Body, practiced in the art of survival. Because you couldn't help others if you yourself were torn in pieces.
And so gently, moving with a lopsided grace and too many legs, she moved back toward the container, trying to figure out what she could do about her brothers and sisters still trapped in there.
*
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