When I was a child growing up in Puerto Rico, there was nothing scarier to me than a lose juey, the taíno name for the native succulent blue crab.

With their pointed eyes, and their claws displayed as mighty weaponry, jueyes can be feisty and unpredictable creatures. They look like they’d snap at you any moment. And they do.

Bolstering their size and power upon sight of the enemy, jueyes resemble angered warriors feeding on each other’s rage. The male’s larger claw can grow up to around six inches in length and can surpass the size of the carapace itself. You can hear their legs ticking as they move sideways. If you listen closely, you may even hear their war cry.

Often, when driving, we’d see a fisherman walking on the side of the road carrying a bundle or two of tied jueyes on a stick. “How much for the dozen,” my father would slow down the car and ask, through the open window. If the price was right, they’d go in the trunk, and it was jueyes for dinner. Other times, dad would come upstairs with a dozen. A gift from a patient. Sometimes he’d treat us to a jueyes farm visit where we could see them in cages. An unforgettable memory.

We (I should say “they,” because I remained quite the observer on this), carefully placed the jueyes in the bathtub, both to contain the crab mob and to clean them. And they’d often got loose from their ties, becoming unhinged, pointing their eyes and raising their claws, furious, moving left and right and charging at anyone or anything that approached them. I can still hear their legs making the tick-tock sound. The sound of time fleeting.

We kids sat for hours in the bathroom, dumbfounded, watching them. Never mind the TV when the jueyes arrived home. My older brothers threatened to pull one out, just to frighten me. They’d warn that if the claw grabbed one of my fingers, it would never let go. I may lose my finger. The terror.

Sometimes the crab army was given a day’s reprieve and stayed in the tub overnight. And occasionally, a rogue soldier would crawl out of the slippery high-security prison that contained he and his mates. How security failed remains a mystery. But I suspected there was surely help from insiders. (Did I mention I had five brothers?)

Inevitably, after all the war-monguering, tick-tocking, and weapon posturing, all the jueyes ended up in the pot. Like all scary, evil, and caught jueyes do. (So I thought, anyways.) And then we’d eat them for dinner and for days after that, in different ways, like Thanksgiving turkey.

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