Death By Snails

 part one

Grandpa was devoured by a thousand tiny mouths. Maybe all men will be. Thousands upon thousands of tiny mouths leaving tiny little bites, compounded, and accelerated over time until every man among us is chewed to bits. Welcome to the future, yeah – hashtag you too.

The snails infected us sometime between 2012 and 2015. We didn’t see it then, most of them landed in water – part of the regularly scheduled pass of the Leonid meteor shower. The theory was that “Comet Shoemaker,” or whatever they called it, had broken off from some far away world and the alien snails, maybe only a few dozen in number, had burrowed deep enough to freeze without really dying. They rode down a fragment of rock and reached the habitable planet we call home and reproduced rapidly. We didn’t detect them for over a decade. They ate algae for a year, maybe 18 months, then moved to water lilies, salamanders, toads, and eventually started working their way up the food chain to small mammals by 2025. They were patient, exacting, and ruthless. Walls of snails pushing down entire wetlands and we hardly noticed at first. Walls of snails so evolved that they used their own dead bodies to propel themselves forward. The technique bought them ten times their normal speed.

As cosmic miniature arthropods, no one was even trained to look for them; and if we are all honest a second, practically no one would have noticed they were here. Maybe some lonely dude in the Adirondacks studying northern amphibian reproduction for a master’s degree and hoping to God he’d one day get laid, might have caught a glimpse of it all, but seriously – let’s be honest - no one with any real power was going to notice a thing. All the secondary and tertiary alphas were long since relegated to obscurity.

There was so much ignorance about climate change and species degradation, we hadn’t dedicated enough funding for trained eyes to be observing. If a few million tadpoles or salamanders went missing over the span of three years, who is truly going to blink? Probably less than 1,000 people globally. Some of them can barely string a sentence together, much less write a peer-reviewed paper. And have you ever bothered to try publishing a peer-reviewed paper? It can take months. The damn academics are about as bad as the trailer-trash when it comes to stopping this sort of cataclysm.

One thing was for certain however: no one watching Fox News would know, or even care if something like the frog population suddenly declined. But when the snails decimated a few thousand raccoons and otters, someone sounded the alarm. Even then, no one’s 401K was at stake over the animals, so nothing was done for eight months after that.

That’s all it took to reproduce another wave twice over, so by the time they hit the larger mammals (the ones who carry credit cards) it was too late.  

Perhaps the most damning feature of mankind is our failure to understand scale. One plastic straw in the soda cup doesn’t feel like much. We tossed them in the trash for a decade even after we were told that one year’s worth of insoluble straws would be enough to circle the Earth four times over. We now could form a chain of them to the moon and back twice. Still, we kept enjoying deep-fried chicken and Dr. Pepper’s while trashing Earth as the snails reproduced at micro turned macro levels. How could we remotely comprehend what they were about to do to us when we didn’t even understand plastic straws?

If you ask me, we got what was coming to us. Yeah, I am sorry some folks watched their infant children devoured by packs of carnivorous snails, but let’s be honest, thousands of tiny, calcified mouths attached to the face of someone’s pride and joy may bother us now, but we never cared when they were eating the rest of the planet. Humans have mostly been myopic, meandering turd-makers in space. Consuming what we could… because we could. And let’s be extra, extra honest and say these snails are doing the same.   

It doesn’t matter what we have learned at this point. What we know now is that all that remains of our species has created a boundary of salt blocks and blow torches to keep them at bay. There wasn’t enough fuel or fire to burn the snails back, not enough salt to dry them out totally. We had to retreat to the deserts where there was nothing to eat on the way to eating us, and enough heat, salt, and fire to burn back anything that tried moving ahead.

Vegas became a super-haven for the rich. People smart enough to leave early settled in places like Tempe or Phoenix. Everything east of the Mississippi and especially in the South was overrun in a matter of weeks. Some of the poor bastards, the doomsday preppers, burrowed in and tried to ride it out. They got muscled out of existence like the rest (pun intended).

Grandpa was eaten by a thousand tiny mouths. I have no idea where dad is, I suspect he’s been eaten. Maybe we all will be. Tiny little mouths leaving tiny bites in the last parts of us that scream humanity into the silence of the Milky Way. Hundreds of millions of us, lost to a culture that found no importance in the little things that matter most.

Reminds me of middle school and high school dating to be honest, not just because a snail’s foot is so much like an elongated vagina either, I mean yeah that is part of it, but no. I mean the culture of middle school and high school dating is so akin to missing the little things that I wondered why it was a surprise we missed these snails.

Fifteen years later, #metoo basically means, “I can carry at least 1/3 of my weight in water, food, and supplies.” It doesn’t mean anything related to a female body at all. Anything less than carrying what the group needs gets left behind. It doesn’t matter if you were a jock in high school, or a nerd, or a cheerleader, or a soccer mom, or something in-between. About all that matters now is what you can carry, and for how long.

Most of the nerds couldn’t carry much for long, and when they did, they’d suffer from panic attacks the moment things got tough. Most of the jocks couldn’t plot decent trajectories using maps and elevation charts. Most of us in the middle just stayed angry at having to lug around the women who never gave us the time of day when we were young, or their fatherless bastard children who did little more than complain every time we ripped up camp to start another day’s trek.

Hell, I am bitching, and snails are little things. I need to be a big thing these days if I hope to stay alive as long as possible. There were about two dozen of us in this caravan, with only four kids. I only say that because the kids were the hardest things to move from point to point and their mommas were always wailing. I have survived long enough to lead, better than that, I can read a map. I know the snails move slow on elevations, and when we are on descents, we got to move double time. Those that cannot keep up, I leave behind. And I have lost a few nights’ sleep over it, but that’s probably to be expected.

“Let the mouth eat the mouth,” is what I tell our people. I’ve seen too many of the group die to listen to even a single complaint. “You don’t like it; you can take it up with the snails.” And in that, I suppose I am not much different than the old Western culture I am running toward, a ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘cowboy mentality’ is what they used to call it. Today, they call it surviving in the old West. Once you have seen a man’s face sucked off by a thousand carnivorous, vaginal-looking snails, the labels kind of fall away. All the grumbling and complaining sounds like little more than a mosquito buzzing around your neck.

By the time we reached Santa Fe, the children were all dead. The snails took two in Texas, the other two within days after crossing the state line. There really wasn’t even that much for the snails to eat in the desert, and frankly, I thought we were in the clear. But the wave of them was so high and so contiguous that they just avalanched one atop the other spanning hundreds of miles of next to nothing. Without calories or anything to fuel them forward, they just kept crashing down on us; all the way through the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range where they found just enough plant life to feed and keep moving. I was both perplexed and envious all at once. Such unholy vigor, such raw power.

 

part two

Rosa was pinned in between the register aisles. The avalanche of snails was coming hard at her, she managed to roll out into the coffee aisle, where I was screaming at her to move. She made it out. Lane didn’t, but Rosa did. Lane was only two checkouts over, but that’s all it took. They’d been married six years is what he told me. In this time, it only takes six steps to separate you from your lover, just half of a cornhole toss from the proverbial ‘till death do us part.’

Me? I never married. Never saw the value in it. Sex was great and having someone to talk to here or there was good too, but the thought of sharing my house with someone else just creeped me out. I had been alone too long, too accustomed to routine, too accustomed to things being the same. Having a wife come in and rearrange my silverware drawers or make suggestions on the wall art that I’d come to love – that was just too much. So, for most of my adult life I had “guest stars” – you know – the late-night visits that were worth journaling about maybe, but you’d never be depraved enough to go that far. The women would come and go, and I’d be no worse for wear. Best of all, I never had to watch my partner of nearly a decade eaten alive by cosmic alien snails. Don’t ever want to imagine what Rosa just witnessed.

“Rosa! Here, now! We have to break for the coolers.” I screamed at her. “Don’t look back!” I begged.

I muscled the large supermarket cooler door shut with a thud as she made her way in, knowing they could not eat through the metal. Yeah, we would likely starve to death in a few weeks provided we didn’t suffocate first. At least here though, we wouldn’t feed the tiny bastards. We might die in the next 24 hours, but at least we wouldn’t be feeding them.

Rosa was screaming, shrieking even, so I held her close. I didn’t have the heart to tell her our odds were slim. She needed to process the death of her husband, who’d basically just been reduced to bones right in front of her.

“Rosa, he’s gone,” I said. “He’s gone. You need to sit down, I have water.”

Rosa sat down beside me, trembling. I didn’t fault her for that, deep down I was shaking too. Twenty of us had gone to just us two in a matter of weeks. We were all used to it by now, most of us had seen friends and family die long before we met up in Little Rock. Rosa had trekked upward from Miami, and she’d seen much more death in the first three weeks than I had seen coming from Charlotte. We took vehicles as far as we could, but the roads just got bogged down.

I was raised in the mountains, and I knew enough about caloric intake and inclines to know the higher we went the slower the snails would travel. Most of the other groups we bumped against didn’t understand this and took the faster routes West, which only made for faster travel for the snails and in turn, got them killed along flat interstate stretches.

Despite outwitting the snails for over six weeks, the passages forward got increasingly difficult. I lost my best friend near Tulsa. It wasn’t his fault; he’d merely turned an ankle. That’s all it took.

“Lane was a good man… a good husband,” she said after taking several sips from the water bottle.

“He was,” I agreed. I remember when Lane begged me not to leave Stewart. Stew and I were buds since the 8^th grade, and I swear I think Lane cared about him more than I did in the end.

I brought Stew’s death up to Rosa. “You did what you had to. If you hadn’t left him, we would have died six weeks ago.” Rosa took my hand.

“Did Lane resent me for it, I mean, did he ever say anything to you about that moment?”

“We didn’t have that kind of relationship,” she said matter of fact and stared into the emptiness of the cooler. It didn’t feel right to prod or go any further than that, so the silence filled the space for a bit.

“What I mean is, we didn’t talk about feelings and things so much. Not before all this started, and not after.” She flipped the bracelet on her arm around in a circle before continuing. “It might have been my fault; I was always so busy with work that I never really took the time to get to know him. I wouldn’t have known how he felt about us leaving your buddy like that, and we were long past the place where he would have shared it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said and left it there. I had been with enough women and for long enough times to know when they were dumping, and I’d learned whatever it was they were dumping wasn’t about me, so nodding and moving on was just easier. If there was more to share, I would doubtless hear it anyway.

“Do you think they will move on out of here and give us a chance to survive?” Rosa looked at me, nearly lifeless in the grief of these last few hours we’d spent running.

“No, I think we will most likely die in this cooler.”

She didn’t respond. She’d known enough men to know our brutal honesty and unnerving acceptance of calamity. She looked away; it was easier. Besides, she knew that if I had more to share about our demise, she’d doubtless hear it anyway. We understood each other this way and it was obvious from the start.

I took inventory of the walk-in cooler, there were vents, but I wasn’t sure if I should try to open them. We’d have to test that tomorrow. Most of the food items that might have been here a month ago when this part of the country moved deeper into the desert were long gone. What was left was clearly spoiled. The cooler was surprisingly still a little cold. The power probably hadn’t gone down here right away and with no one left around this town to keep opening the doors, it had held its temperature well.

There was enough room in the cooler for privacy. Large tubs that once held ice cream, I dumped out into a floor drain so we could use as commodes. I made us a “His” and “Hers” sign on them using a sharpie I found in the corner hanging on a string. We’d use the tub lids to keep the smell down. I checked off sanitation, at least for now.

The only two things that couldn’t have spoiled in the cooler were the large kegs of beer on one end, and a huge crate of carrots on the top shelf that a person would have needed a forklift to get down. There wasn’t enough room at the top to get your hand in to lighten the box, so I suspected the looters just left them be. The kegs of course would have been way too heavy to move, and they’d taken up too much space. People left them undisturbed.

Rosa and I worked the last half of the day on the carrot crate using ropes and my pulleys. I had just enough geek in me to not only know how to use a pulley, but also to know it was worth the weight in water, so I had packed three of them. Mostly because I knew we’d be lugging some of our gear over the mountains, although I confess, I never thought I would be using them in a supermarket cooler trying to drag out a crate of carrots that may or may not be edible.

They came crashing down, spilling all over the floor. In a glance, I figured we had enough carrots and beer for maybe a month if we paced ourselves, but I also knew what hunger does to people, so I cut that time back by a week. I am not sure that anyone had really seen the back end of a snail slaughter or studied it long enough to know what it leaves behind. Anything behind a snail pack most likely died, and whatever did make it out couldn’t really communicate back what they saw. At least not since we’d been on the run. We were in the dark here, really.

I had a little bit of water, so we rationed that and mostly drank the beer. Scary thing was, after three or four nights of that, we didn’t miss the water. I was almost asleep a few nights in when she clicked her flashlight on and off a dozen times, aiming at me. “So, it’s just you and me in total privacy with seven kegs of beer,” she laughed. “Must have been some kind of life-long dream of yours to get a girl in this predicament.”

“You’re drunk,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

“Come on dude, if we’re really going to die, you have to learn how to relax.”

“I hate beer,” I said and turned over to face the wall. “I am drinking only what I need. Besides that, we have water. I just have to figure out how to get it for us. I am exhausted, and hungry. I need to sleep.”

“Where will you find water?” She asked incredulous.

I turned on my light and aimed it at the sprinkler system running through the center of the cooler. “There.”

 

part three

Despite having tapped into the sprinkler system and having what I believed to be about a week of water stored in the lines, Rosa stayed drunk for the first week and I wasn’t far behind her. If we’d had natural light, we might not ever have sobered up, but we didn’t so we slept off the soreness and booze quite a bit. The supermarket cooler warmed quickly from just our body heat. Truthfully, I was surprised it got warm that fast, almost as surprised to have found it chilled to begin with. We’d snap on the lights from our backpacks long enough to eat a few carrots and down a thermos of beer, then sweat and sleep it all off until the next round. We never knew if it was day or night.

She was a fun drunk and tended to drink two or three times what I did. If I really thought we had a chance of making it out of here, I might have slowed her down. There were several intoxicated moments when she cried incessantly over losing Lane, but then she would shift almost on a dime back to laughter and silliness. She went back and forth most days until she slept. Once we learned to loosen the valve, we probably only used the sprinkler to re-hydrate in what felt like the mornings, then it was back to the kegs by midday.

Somewhere, around day ten or twelve, a little natural light crept in. The cooler had clear block windows near the ceiling, maybe eight feet above us. The walls of the supermarket were porous from the snail wave. I awoke one morning, or maybe afternoon, I couldn’t tell from the steady drinking, to Rosa’s face near mine. What I mean is, that I could actually see it. Parts of it anyway.

Her eyes were dark brown, flickering open a few times, I think because she unconsciously knew I was studying her. Her skin was tan but seemed almost ghostly white as it reflected the glimmer of light above. Her nose wrinkled a few times as she slept. I noticed her arm around my shoulder, so I rolled over a bit to get flat on my back. She stirred.

“Is that light?” She asked.

“Yeah, I think so. I think the wave passed and whatever was left behind is dying and slipping off the walls and windows.”

“Will we be able to leave here?”

“As near as I can tell, they never made the ventilation ducts. If they had, we’d be dead. That means they climbed to maybe ten feet on the wave, but not fifteen or twenty. They never made it to the top of the building.”

“Which means what?”

“It means they’re receding, like flood waters on a creek. Maybe a foot a day, who knows? If they keep dying and falling away, we might stand a chance.”

Rosa sat up from her sleeping bag. “I will settle just for the light… and a shower. Can we spare the sprinkler water?”

“I think so, and that’s a good idea. I don’t think a day of water is going to matter either way. But we shouldn’t waste it.” I stood up and stripped out of my soiled shirt. “We should wash our clothes too,” I said. “You can’t afford a UTI in here and I know I reek enough of body odor to make us both sick.”

“What makes you think I would get a urinary track infection?” She said, slipping off her shirt. “You think that just because I am a woman, I am a liability. That we’re just naturally weaker.”

“No, it’s not that. I’ve been with dozens of women, and I have seen enough to know how these things go. You’re wearing the same clothes, same three set of underpants, this is a damp environment, and we’ve been on the run for days on end. It’s just a thing we guys don’t have to deal with often, but you need to watch for it. We can’t afford that to happen to you right now. We need to scrub the clothes down, re-sanitize and be ready to move again if that is ever going to be possible.”

“You’re kind of a jerk, you know?” She said, fully nude now.

“Maybe,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it.

“While we’re on the topic of you being a jerk, I don’t appreciate you constantly referring to the snails’ mouths as somehow being vaginal. It’s offensive to me as a woman.” Rosa looked at me, her body glistening in the little light streaming over the top of the window.

“That was just something Stewart and I used to say when we were first on the run. I didn’t realize I had used the metaphor around you; have I really ever said it that much?”

“Yes, a dozen times at least.” She scoured at me.

“I will certainly be more careful, and I apologize. I meant no offense.”

We huddled together under the sprinkler head as the water ran down, sharing the soap and the stream. Then we scrubbed and rung out all the clothing we had, setting it on the food racks to dry. I took in all the features of her body as she moved around the cooler. She was thin, like me, both our bodies worn down from the weeks of constant travel, running, and limited calories. She was clearly athletic too, at least at one point, her collar bone met a rounded shoulder muscle perched above tenuous, skinny arms, but I could still tell those arms had once been fitter. Her breasts were firm, nipples raised from the cooling of the air on wet skin.

She turned to me and caught my stare. “We should drink a beer while we drip-dry.”

“Of course,” I said filling both our thermoses with beer that was now warm and not nearly as enjoyable as when we first arrived.

We sat down on our sleeping bags, naked, and took long swigs of the beer.

“It’s just derogatory, that’s all.” She said picking back up on the snail comparison. “These things are disgusting and they’re trying to kill us.”

“Derogatory as in maybe referring to a man’s penis as a snake?” I asked her.

“No, that’s different. Men aren’t subjected to the same degree of shame about their bodies that women are. They’re even likely to brag about having a snake. It’s different.”

“I can see your point. Like I said, I won’t use the metaphor again.” I replied.

“Thanks.” She leaned back on both arms and looked intently at me. “I can see why you never married.”

“Why is that?” I asked inquisitively.

“I don’t think you like women, not… I mean, I am not saying you’re gay… I mean outside of seeing us as objects, I don’t think you care much for women.”

“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t really know me outside of these past six or seven weeks. In fact, I don’t think we even talked much until we were stuck in here.” I shot back.

“You’re just flat, or worse, harsh, most of the time.”

“Maybe I am just in shock, operating with a kind of survival PTSD.” I suggested.

“No, you’re like me in that regard. We both compartmentalize and move on. What I am saying is that a person doesn’t have to do that without feeling any emotion. You basically haven’t had a single emotion since we’ve been in this cooler.”

“We laugh when we’re drunk, don’t we? I don’t get where this is coming from, and why now? I mean you said I was derogatory for calling the snails a bunch of devouring vaginas, and then follow it by offering some kind of critical psychoanalysis of my character?”

I looked away from her, hearing the frustration in my voice.

“Your tone speaks volumes.”

“Does it? What does it say?” I retorted.

“I tell you what, I will listen a moment. Why don’t you tell me honestly why you never married,” she looked at me intently, her body almost dry now, but the wet in her hair still shimmering in the light.

“It’s certainly had nothing to do with some kind of contempt I have toward women, that is for sure.”

“What do you believe about women?” She asked. “And don’t bullshit me.”

There was a little gleam in her eye that made me think she was becoming aroused. I had misread enough cues in my life not to put much stock in that observation and given the way Rosa was on about my personality, I figured I was probably way off base.

“I don’t believe that it is possible to believe something generic about women, that all women are different, like all men are different. I believe slapping labels or generalities on each other just heightens our problems and doesn’t solve any of them.”

Rosa stared a second, then said, “You’re bull-shitting me. And for someone who doesn’t want to make generic statements, you just made one. Tell me something that you, the individual, believes about women.”

“Ok, I believe that many women, maybe yourself included, live with doubts as to whether strength and gentleness can coexist in a man. I believe that you somehow assumed that my resoluteness means I am void of empathy, and that you have difficulty seeing both of those as two sides of the same coin. I believe that many women both crave and fear genuine masculinity.”

“I am still listening. And I am mostly curious about your distorted idea that somehow we crave masculinity.” She said petulantly. “In my experience, unfiltered masculinity is toxic. This conversation makes me feel very lucky to have met Lane. He was nothing like you.”

“I’m glad you had Lane, good for you. I am sure he was a wonderful man. I can’t understand why you’re busting my balls here,” I said. “I thought I had treated you pretty well these past few days.”

“You think my husband was weak,” she shot back. “You think he was too weak to have led us this far.”

“I never thought that. Not once, but since you brought it up, I think maybe you thought he was weak, and I think that maybe I am just a convenient place for you to dump that feeling right about now.” As I said this, I could see her turn away and wrestle internally, so of course I continued.

“Listen, you asked why I never married. It’s because I had seen way too many of my friends remain confused as to who they should be because the women in their lives had them constantly second guessing themselves. You won’t be doing that to me. Stewart became a shell of a man after his divorce; he was never the same. He tore himself apart because his shit wife was the only thing he ever wanted. Despite giving her everything, she still went and had an affair with her gym instructor. He left that relationship feeling like he wasn’t enough. And you know, maybe he wasn’t… I don’t know. I just know that none of that is any of my business. Neither is the business between you and Lane. Leave me out of it.”

“So, you never married because you think women are cheaters? Your poor buddy Stewart, who you let die back there, was a victim. So, you never marry because you don’t want to be one either? That’s classic.” Rosa smirked and leaned back onto one elbow, propping her head up. As she grew agitated, the full length of her body became increasingly erotic as she moved, welcoming to my sight. I know she caught me staring at her.

“That’s not what I mean. I think when a man surrenders himself to a woman completely, he surrenders something of his nature to her. I believe that she cannot much help but want to tame the parts of him that don’t find agreement with her. And yet, ironically, the more he succumbs to her remaking of him, the more his woman intrinsically loses interest. Maybe that’s why you and Lane stopped talking. Maybe he wasn’t weak at all, he just wasn’t sure who he was supposed to be with you – or what you would allow him to be.”

For the first time in however many drunk days we’d shared, Rosa remained silent.

“Listen, I’m not saying anything. Truth is, I have no idea; I just know what my guy buddies went through in marriage and decided I didn’t want that life. And as an unmarried man, I got to see both sides of it.”

“What do you mean,” she asked.

“Sometimes that same woman who loses interest in her tamed man will pursue an untamed man either literally as in the case of Stewart’s wife, or in fantasy, or maybe just in simple emotional resentment. I found this to be the case with so many women I have slept with over the years – some of them married to men they had no plan of ever leaving.”

“So, you’re a dog?” She said with a wry smile. “Did you sleep with Stewart’s x-wife?“

“God, no. Give me a little credit.”

“Still, you’re a player… but you’re off your game, you know.”

“How’s that?”

“We’ve been laying here naked together for fifteen minutes and you haven’t even suggested sex. You haven’t complimented me on my body, and I only caught you checking me out once. Don’t you like me?”

“You have a wonderful body. I just didn’t want to seem…. toxic.” I quipped, laughing, and rolling over to my back.

“Shut up and get over here.” She tugged once on my arm. That’s all it took.

 

part four

Rosa stared into the emptiness of the bay listening to the sound of a hundred crushed shells behind her as he approached. In the distance, a white swan shuddered and shook in the evening sun. The droplets of the bird’s body shone like celestial fire as they fell.

It had been three years since she and the man left the cooler. The lack of charm she’d been so drawn to then, had long worn thin. His body, fuller now that the threat had passed, weighed heavier on her in the cool of evening when they fucked. His eyes had gone dark, the threat of death now removed had caused his limbs to weaken. Even his breath would turn her stomach some mornings.

Through it all, he provided. The ground was saturated with thin harvests. Their diet was mostly just meats from fish and heron that populated the shoreline. With a long stare sometimes, he would drift away into nothingness after a day’s foraging and though she tugged her lips gently on him some nights until he screamed in orgasm, she hadn’t been wet herself in months. Deep down she knew that he knew it.

She heard backs of the snails breaking beneath his weight as he approached, then she felt his arms slip quietly around her from behind. The woman tried hard not to flinch.

The swan skated effortlessly onward and out of sight. The sun set in an orange-hot beauty across the sky. She sighed and wished she’d somehow learned to pray through this struggle because in that moment, simply watching the swan take flight, things felt too sacred for common words.

Instead of prayer, she gently pried his fingers from around her waist and turned back to the bayside cabin they’d made their home. She spoke not a word.

In the cabin were the pictures of a former family she had never taken down. Their images swelled in the firelight. The structured, commanded poses. The curling iron hair. The hand the photographer had manually set upon hers… and in that old, professionally sculpted photo, beneath it even, she recognized in herself the same dull smile of the aging wife who died here years ago.

Outside, the empty shell of the man looked once again on all the snails had wrought. Every erected thing man had made was chewed, worn down, and greased with suffering.

Inside the woman watched the man as he looked helplessly outward. She remembered, if just for an instant, that time in the cooler when he pushed her heels backward and folded her onto herself. She remembered the time she welcomed him, with eagerness even along the edges of his crucified gaze; and how she first invited him there in the shallow wet, and how his sun soon set for her, receding with the wave of snails they had fled together.

The woman turned, these hard years later and she slid her elongated, dry foot across the linoleum. She took the plates from the cabinet, the corners of her singular mouth turned upward. As slow as a snail, she shifted her head forward to the window, churning a loveless soup and waiting for dark.