Then I came home and read this,
Slugs
by Brian Swann
Who could have dreamed them up? At
least snails
have shells, but all these have
is—nothing.
Small black antennae like fat pins
wave
as if they could take in enough to
get them through.
Turn them over, they’re the soles of
new shoes,
pale and unmarked as babies. They
flow,
the soil itself learning how to move
and, moving,
almost staying still, their silver
monorail
the only evidence of where they’d
been.
And they die quiet, or at least
(thankfully)
out of the human ear’s range, between
two stones,
under heels, shriveling in salt or
piss, at the tips
of sharp sticks. Fight back, I hear
myself say,
do something. Don’t just take it. But they die
as they had lived, exuding slime,
like
the smaller boys, who’d just
stand there, miserable in short
pants,
school socks down to their ankles,
school tie unknotted and askew, and
flowing
from noses slow cauls of snot that
from time to time they’d lick or
sniff back up
part way, until it flowed again,
coating
the upper lip, falling into the
mouth, mixing
with tears before anything had been
done,
the fear itself enough, so even if we
wanted
we couldn’t let them off. Sometimes
it was
the knee “where you daren’t show your
mother,”
other times the kick in the shins,
the stick over
the head, the punch in the mouth,
while they
just stood there, or double up,
gasping
for breath, and we did it again.
Suddenly, I remembered that as a child I learned to pour salt on slugs. I watched them, delighted to see them shrivel, dying before me, without ever, even once, considering what I was doing. I want to think I fel pleasure because I was a child and because I believed that whatever a parent taught me to do was the right thing.
Since walking and looking and noticing, I am not so sure that I didn't enjoy the killing and dying for their own sake.
And I feel ashamed for years of mindless squashing.
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