The Snail That This All Is About
by Ezri Wyman
There was a snail shell on the sidewalk by the bus stop. Sam kicked it. It rolled against the wall of the bus shelter. Sam pushed it around with the toe of his sneaker and it bumped and scraped across the ground.
When snails are born, their shells are soft and translucent, and as they grow, their shells become opaque and harden. The shells grow along with the snails in a spiral, one layer at a time. Did you know that? Of course you didn’t; you only think about yourself.
This would have been a good metaphor for Sam. He was a being of constant change. The snail shell isn’t actually a metaphor for Sam. This story isn’t about Sam. The snail shell is what remains of the snail that this story is about.
This story doesn’t start on the sidewalk by a bus stop. It starts on a warm spring day, in a yard, on a stalk of grass. The sky was blue, the birds were chirping. In short it was a beautiful day. Aside from the birds that is. The birds could have been mildly problematic, though on this particular occasion they weren’t.
This was the day that the snail hatched. It ate its way through the shell of its egg, one of dozens on that stalk of grass. It was tiny and translucent and entered the world with neither a mother nor a father. This isn’t to say that the snail was an orphan, just that snails are hermaphrodites, so neither parent was a mother or a father exactly. That and its parents weren’t there, but that’s just a snail thing. Sam sometimes wished that his parents weren’t there, but Sam also wasn’t a snail. At least he thought he wasn’t.
The snail went on with its life quietly and namelessly. This wasn’t an issue for it. Snails communicate with chemicals in their slime so having a name wouldn’t have done it any good. Let’s call it Herbert. This is just for your benefit, the snail doesn’t care. I certainly don’t care, but nobody cares what the narrator thinks.
“Get back to the story,” you’re probably thinking, “since when does the narrator get to have an opinion?”
That’s beside the point, though, let’s get back to the story. Okay, this story is about a snail, who we’re calling Herbert for reasons of convenience, and there’s a boy named Sam but this story isn’t about him.
Not long after hatching, Herbert decided that it would be a good plan to move away from the place it had been born. Sam felt this way too, but still did not have to worry about birds. Herbert was also primarily motivated by a desire for cabbage, which Sam distinctly did not like. That and the snail could only move at 0.04 kilometers per hour.
Fortunately for Herbert, it was in no rush and its slow speed was no issue in finding cabbage. That summer was perfect. Herbert was part of a veritable plague of snails that ate the cabbages of one Ms. Nancy Laurens. Nancy took great pride in her cabbages. The snails would have taken great pride in them too, if pride was the kind of thing snails went for, which it isn’t. Unfortunately, Nancy eventually learned that snails don’t like copper. Nobody knows why this is, it’s just a well-known fact. It doesn’t always work, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it, because there’s no real reason why it would. Herbert was not aware of this fact, and if anything enjoyed a little less competition for the best spots in the garden after Nancy added copper strips to the landscape of her garden.
As summer drew to a close, and the nights got colder, Herbert climbed plants at night to avoid the frost. Halloween came and went, and it did not notice. Herbert was a snail, remember? Snails don’t do Halloween, that’s a human thing. You humans are so weird. Anyway, once frost covered the ground well into the day, Herbert found a sheltered spot and coated itself in mucus to keep from drying out.
Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s so gross,” but it’s much less gross than breaking bones or blowing your nose or any of the other gross squishy things that humans do and snails don’t. It spent the winter sleeping in its moist, safe shell.
Come the spring thaw, Herbert woke up, broke through the mucus coating on its shell, and started looking for food. Unfortunately for it, Nancy Laurens had given up on cabbages. Her son wouldn’t eat them and the snails would, which seemed to matter immensely to her, although I’m of the opinion that as long as they were getting eaten there was no harm done.
Herbert ate a lot of leaves. It found some other vegetable gardens and occasionally compost heaps. It found nowhere quite as perfect as the garden of that first summer, and certainly nothing worth staying in one place, out in the open for. In late spring, it found a slime trail leading in much the same way it was traveling. It followed the trail, because that seemed like the right thing to do.
The trail led Herbert to another snail. A snail similar to itself in size and colouring and unlike itself mainly in the fact that they were different individuals. The result, at length, of this situation was that Herbert won the evolutionary lottery and got to pass on its genetic information to a bunch of baby snails. Herbert and the other snail’s eggs hatched into a whole rout of snails, a walk of snails, an escargatoire of snails. Those words are all synonyms, and they all mean a group of snails. You get the point; there were lots of them.
There is no word for baby snails. I believe this is because humans cannot be bothered to think about other species. There should be one, though, and so I will make one up. The eggs hatched into a whole escargatoire of squishlings. Look, I’m not a taxonomist; I’m just a frustrated narrator trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Herbert was not aware of the squishlings that it had sired. It went on with its life as it always had.
Snails can live up to 4 years in the wild, but they often fall prey to birds, humans, or weather before that. One of the snails that was, in a purely genetic way, a child of Herbert, lived only 4 months before ending up on the sole of Sam’s shoe. Sam did not notice. Herbert did not notice either. It had more important things to worry about, like not meeting the same fate.
Summer was sticky and damp. Herbert climbed to stay out of puddles. It climbed as though its life depended on it, which, in fact, it did. A small bird tried to eat Herbert, only to be stopped by a larger bird eating the smaller bird. Fortunately, the larger bird was too full to bother eating Herbert afterwards.
No, it was not a bird that got Herbert in the end. Nor was it a human’s shoe. It was not water and it was not heat. It was something much quieter, much prettier, and much more dangerous.
Autumn had been mild; Herbert had only needed to climb to escape frost a few times by the end of October. It was only a week or two until it would form a mucus shell and go to sleep for the winter. There was salt on the sidewalk. Unlike copper, Herbert knew that it did not like salt. Fortunately, there was a way around it. Unfortunately, the maximum speed for traveling this route was the aforementioned 0.04 kilometers per hour.
A side note; snails are not good at math. This is largely due to the fact that math is a very human thing. For non-humans, everything just is the way that it is. It doesn’t need to be numbers.
In this particular instance, some math may have been useful. It was getting cold. The salt on the sidewalk was there to minimize another threat. Salt didn’t get Herbert, but frost did. Had it been aware of the passing of time and of the dropping temperature, perhaps it wouldn’t have kept going forward, perhaps it would have returned to a patch of grass and climbed a dandelion stalk, and perhaps it would not have frozen. It had not.
Morning found sidewalks, rooftops, and blades of grass glittering with tiny ice crystals. It also found a snail frozen solid on the sidewalk, beside a patch of salt. The next few days were warmer and ants picked clean the shell that had once belonged to Herbert. The empty shell was left sitting on the sidewalk beside a bus stop.
Sam was waiting for the bus. He kicked a snail shell. The bus was late, as usual, and Sam was cold. He was wearing a sweater, but it wasn’t thick enough. He shivered. The bus finally pulled up to the stop and he crushed the shell with his heel as he stepped onto it. He huddled in a seat.
Though one of Herbert’s children met its fate on Sam’s shoe, another of them was looking for a safe place to spend the winter. It had climbed up the post of a traffic light and found a hole in the casing just big enough to get through. Inside the casing, it began crawling across the circuit board that made the light work. The snail left a slimy trail behind itself that, once it had reached the other side of the board caused the light to short circuit. There were no sparks, and no sound.
The inside of the light heated up for a moment, just long enough to fry the snail where it sat, then stopped working altogether.
A car and a bus reached the intersection where the traffic light stood at the same time. Without the light to moderate, the car assumed it had the right of way (it did not). The car tried to turn and the bus, the very same bus that Sam was on, swerved to avoid it.
As the bus driver tried to regain control of the vehicle, the bus drove over the barrier beside the road and off the side of a bridge.
Nancy Laurens, who had been walking to a hardware store to get more copper strips, saw the bus fall. She watched as it crumpled against the ground. In a matter of seconds what had once been a bus became only a heap of ruined metal. Nancy wanted to look away, but she couldn’t. She watched flames lick up the sides of the wreckage. It didn’t feel real. This sort of thing happened in movies, not in real life as you walked across a bridge minding your own merry business. She wished she could keep walking, or call an ambulance, or do anything. She didn’t. Instead she stood transfixed by the flames and the smoke and the smashed metal far below. Humans can’t look away when other humans die. You’re at once both horrified and fascinated. You’re stuck. Stuck, but not as stuck as the people on the bus. Not as stuck as Sam, because humans, eventually, get unstuck. The people on the bus won’t.
I’m sorry, were you upset about Sam? This story isn’t even about Sam. How could you possibly feel for the life of a character unrelated to our protagonist in any way when the scion of our protagonist have perished not once, but twice in this narrative. How could anyone possibly be upset about Sam after the untimely demise of a snail that was named Herbert only to you, the reader, but was so much more to the world at large. You stay and watch and get stuck when humans die, but nobody watches the snail on the bottom of a shoe, or in the circuitry, or frozen to death on a sidewalk.
Humans get upset about the deaths of their own kind but refuse to acknowledge the simple truth that the snails are no different. You are snails. You go about your lives trying to stay warm, and to stay dry, and to stay fed. Like snails you will inevitably die meaningless deaths in a universe that doesn’t care whether you die a hero or a nobody.
I certainly don’t care, but nobody cares what the narrator thinks.