-2024- - Memoir Of A Snail

People ask me if I’m lonely. I tell them: lonely is just a word for people who haven’t learned to listen to the quiet. A snail’s memoir isn’t loud. It’s a wet, shining line on a dark pavement. And if you follow it long enough—past the fish-and-chips shop, past the caravan, past the dead clown and the frozen poodle—you’ll find someone tapping their ring on a glass jar, smiling.

One night, drunk on cooking sherry, I wrote Gilbert a terrible letter. “I’m a bad twin. I’m a widow. I’m a museum of useless grief. Don’t come find me.” I didn’t send it. I ate it. Paper and all. Weeks later, a package arrived. No return address. Inside: a dried beetle labeled “Aristotle” and a napkin with a single sentence: “I’m not your other half, Gracie. You’re whole. You always were. – G.” Memoir of a Snail -2024-

Phyliss believed children should be seen and not heard—and preferably not seen either. She fed us boiled cabbage and regret. The only light was Gilbert. He was my other half. He collected beetles and named them after philosophers. He taught me that a snail’s foot is a single, rippling muscle. “We’re like that, Gracie,” he’d whisper. “One muscle. Slow. But we get there.” When we were seventeen, the government separated us. Gilbert, because he had a “mechanical mind,” was sent to a boy’s reform farm in the dry, red center of Australia. I was sent to a foster home in Canberra—a concrete box belonging to a married couple named Barry and Maureen. Barry sold used mufflers. Maureen sold Tupperware. Their love language was passive-aggressive note-leaving. People ask me if I’m lonely

Tap. Tap. Tap.

After that, I stopped leaving the caravan. I grew a small garden of moss on the windowsill. I stopped showering. I wrote letters to Gilbert I never mailed. The shoeboxes multiplied—under the bed, in the oven, inside the toilet tank. I became a snail: soft, shelled, withdrawing at the slightest touch. It’s a wet, shining line on a dark pavement

And then, a key. A small, tarnished key.

I realized something that morning, watching Sylvia the snail leave a silver trail across my thumb: grief is not a shell. It’s a foot. You ripple forward. Millimeter by millimeter. You leave a little of yourself behind, but you keep going. I’m sixty-nine now. I still live in the caravan. The snails have great-grandchildren. I clean the shoeboxes once a year, then put them back. Gilbert came to visit last Christmas. He brought Socrates the goat’s great-great-grandson. The goat ate my curtains. I didn’t mind.