Slugs

I don’t know where they come from, showing up as they do in the same spot on the bedroom floor, no cracks that I see they can slip through or vent or drain: there for me to step on in bare feet as I climb wearily into bed on a rain-soaked evening, at first sure that it must be dog poop I’ve found, given how slimy and cold it feels to the foot, given the rain and the impossibility of Giri della Rocca and, now especially, with Desiree’s recent confinement and sure knowledge that her rival puppy has been born –this slippery something could be her vendetta.

It is such a tiny, innocuous thing to cause in me such fright. A snail without its shell, a wisp of protoplasm, smaller than my smallest finger, glistening there, streaking its mucous path across the polished wood -floor, a hoodwinking path that almost convinces it is traceable to some point of origin until one sees it is simply a smear. Could it be that it fell from the sky—or simply materialized, something self-generating, born of the air’s moisture or some creature of my own rainy day angst and frustration, the anti-pearl of my restlessness, my own tight shell creating nothing more glorious than the snot of a mollusk, dripping into its being from some crimp in my own. Impossible, I know.

All creatures great and small, I think, and wonder how best to love the unlovable alien that clings to the floorboard, resistant to all my efforts toward pathetic fallacy, the need to anthropomorphize, give sentience to what I must consider a sentient being though I cannot quite reach that far inside a creature that appears not to have eyes. I should ache for the rawness of it, the shell-less, sheer exemplum of stripped nakedness and vulnerability, but the fear harks back to worms and stories of blood-letting, leaches: the mysterious parasite that finds its way into skin by night from no place I can name and might also slither into the depths of me through my sleep. Mind says it’s innocuous but my flesh crawls knowing otherwise.

It may not necessarily be the otherness of this creature that repels, but its sameness to a tenderness within myself—a lopped off piece of viscera, lost from who knows where inside me, suddenly there, not really wiggling but surely capable of wiggling, still alive on the floor.

I cannot feel pity for a thing without eyes.

I accept the word of others: they are hermaphrodites, these gastropods—with a propensity to be male and also to bite off each other’s penis and thereafter reproduce as females; an insight that should make me chuckle or at least rouse enough curiosity for me to poke it with a pencil, if only to see what state my bedfellow’s penis is in, and maybe also find the tongue I’m told is covered with tiny teeth. All I see is the blip of protoplasm, a nothing blip, too tiny to arouse in me this fear.

I believe it easy enough to overcome. One need only reach for a piece of toilet paper and pinch the tissue around the creature as one might in fact clean up after the dog—carry the bundle at arm’s length toward the toilet, toss and flush. One might then of course have to contend with New York sewer fears, the colonies of alligators and overgrown carp-from-goldfish that have evolved in our imaginings of the underworld. But I tell myself not seeing is not believing—along the lines of out of sight out of mind, or so I want to believe about belief as I begin the Sisyphean task of clearing my life of this tiny onus.