The Slow Curves of Its Path¹ (Haplotrema concavum)

The snail had been moving along the garden wall for over an hour. Since she started watching it. She found the smooth, slow curves of its path soothing. She watched the way that the trail gradually dried up, so slowly that you couldn’t see it finally dry. That one last step a leap of faith somehow. No intermediacy between a little wet and dry. She also found this irony soothing. In the way Kierkegaard is soothing. For fifteen minutes she had rested her chin on the end of the garden wall and watched the slow, relentless movement toward her.

The house lay beyond the manicured lawn which lay beyond the herb garden which lay beyond the vegetable garden which came up to the garden wall. In the house a single light shone in the window. Trying to read and managing it, she thought. That’s what bothered her most about the whole thing—he could just concentrate on something else. Like the fight wasn’t even a distraction. Didn’t even merit that much thought. Hadn’t even happened. She knew it had. She thought she might give him a piece of her mind about that.

The snail slid, deliberately, off course—vertical. Down the cement lip of the top of the wall, then momentarily, breathtakingly, upside down. Then on down to the stone wall lightly dusted with moss, tiny cilia that clung to the wall with equal obstinacy. The trail suddenly flared up orange as the sun shone violently through the clouds and then tree branches and just as quickly disappeared. The snail didn’t slow down or speed up or stop. She imagined the snail had one impetus, one thought, one appetite in its body and that that singularity precluded it from noticing beauty.

Why not? he wanted to know. She didn’t have an answer for that, often didn’t have specific, logical answers for the specific, logical questions he asked. She knew that her lack of a specific, logical answer would make him mad, that her lack of any answer would make him mad, that her answer would make him mad and that her silence would make him mad. Well? he demanded. She shrugged. She felt like a child, storyless, and that made her mad at herself, at him, at the world. He sighed and rolled his eyes. Then he walked away to think about something else. To devour something else.

At one particularly precipitous stone halfway down the wall, the snail tumbled to the ground, rolled down the narrow grass embankment and stopped at the lip into the vegetable garden. She knew it had begun with that plan. Its one goal. She knew that it would consume and destroy, given enough time, the lettuce, the carrots, the tomatoes, the celery, the basil, the thyme—all the things that made up this garden’s life. It would grow immense and engorged and deadly. She traced her finger next to the dry trail at the top of the wall, from the beginning to the end, its curves, sudden and gradual. How did it get up here? she wondered. She didn’t have an answer. When she got to the end of the trail she stepped on the fragile shell of the snail as it lay at the very edge of the garden. It made a tiny popping sound. Then she thought, that story’s over.