Fiction | May 02, 2025

A Crawfish Boil at the End of the World 

William Torrey 

 When we are wrung dry and can’t stand the thought of ourselves for even one more day, we call up a meeting of the Shame Society. There are four of us: Ernie the attorney, Mickey the chef, Hal the scientist, and me, Wally, the adjunct professor. Really my title is adjunct instructor, but my wife says the latter sounds weak. “Call yourself by the title you want!” She’s on a kick with some self-help podcast. Seed to Blossom, or something like that. Either way, the school where I teach might soon shut its doors, run dead to the ground by Baton Rouge fat cats. Either way, the wife and I don’t eat much steak. I eagerly await some kind of solution, but nobody’s tossing out lifelines.  

We pile into Ernie’s Tahoe and head to Delacroix with the bay boat in tow. The town in its heyday was a hub for shrimpers. Now it’s a hideout for runaway drunks. There’s a Rouse’s and a Rite Aid but no Walmart. Delacroix. People call it the end of the world.