Listen to this story.
One had to expect consequences for the frivolous abuse of animals.
“That was years ago,” I said. Besides, the slime creeped me out.
I’d tried the South Korean snail mucin wrinkle cream exactly once, and just because it was recommended in a women’s magazine at a Helsinki hair salon with overhead lights that made me look like my paternal grandmother shortly after her death at 83.
“No statute of limitations for murder,” daughter said. “And trashing the half-used jar made it worse. Utter waste. “
Daughter was fifteen, and a vegetarian pacifist animal activist, of course. Much like I’d been, before I had her and realized I’d kill—and eat-–anything to keep her alive.
The summer before, she’d insisted on traveling to a sit-in protest against a mosquito slaying contest. Though I’d considered mentioning the millions of people mosquito-borne diseases killed, I only suggested protective clothing and a bug repellent. The contest wasn’t held in a fetid jungle but Finnish Lapland. No anacondas around. Just Santa’s reindeer.
Daughter came back early, covered in huge, itchy welts that took weeks to fade. First lesson about nature learned: bloodsuckers can’t be saved in T-shirts and shorts. Nature forces all of us to make hard choices. Jobs or climate? Locally made cheese or avocados flown in? Snails or orchids?
“Why would nature strike back now? In Lisbon?”
“Hive intelligence,” daughter said. “You didn’t have a garden in Helsinki. Now you do. Kaboom!”
Researchers had recently found a continuous ant colony that stretched 3,700 miles from the Alps to the Atlantic. If ants could build massive colonies, why wouldn’t snails? Who knew how intelligent they actually were?
She had a point. The snails devouring my flowers were surprisingly cunning for invertebrates with an estimated IQ that was lower than their speed in miles. They hadn’t been deterred by coffee grounds, glass shards, eggshells, foil, water moats, or copper strips. Nor had they been fooled by beer traps or poison bait. I’d started to suspect they were actually aliens, dropped down from drones, like some horror movie version of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
“I assume the order to attack you came by airmail from Seoul,” daughter said.
“Flying avenger snails? I knew it!”
“Don’t be silly, Mom. Frequent flier ones.”
At the speed of 0.03 miles per hour, it would’ve taken 30 years to send snail mail from Seoul overland. But snails were known to hitch rides by crawling aboard roosting birds at night. The flight wouldn’t have been a direct one, of course, unless snails had mind control over the birds, the way toxoplasmosis made mice love cats. It might’ve taken lots of time and flight legs to reach Lisbon.
“Interesting theory but wrong premise,” I countered. “No snails were murdered for the wrinkle cream. Dead snails don’t slime.” As a latter-day mass murderer of snails, I knew that for a fact.
The first snails I killed had really been asking for it. My orchids had already been rasped to death when I surprised two big and ugly brown snails in the first double amaryllis to open. In the red fury of the moment, crushing the snails with garden shears felt not only justified, but actually good. It even produced a most satisfying farewell sound. Crunch!
When I spotted several smaller snails on top of the dead ones later, I felt awful. Maybe I’d killed their Mama. Then I realized the smaller snails weren’t kissing and hugging Mama goodbye but eating her. Google knew carrion was a good source of protein, a carcass an invitation to dinner.
Many more snail carcasses had followed, but I gave my next victims a proper funeral in a fancy glass sarcophagus with a golden top, aka a Nescafe instant coffee jar.
I figured stopping cannibalism was as good a reason as any for favoring plants over snails. A single snail could make 400 new ones in a year. A dead orchid would nourish none. Snails would be eating each other in no time.
“Maybe the snails are gently milked for mucin,” I said. “Like snakes for antivenom.”
“Not so,” daughter said, reading from her phone. Snails only produced mucus when stressed. They were being enslaved and tortured on those Korean snail farms as we spoke! Mucin wrinkle cream was now a global, half-billion-dollar beauty business. Why couldn’t women just wrinkle gracefully? Patriarchy sucked!
“Well,…” I started, but it wasn’t that simple. As daughter would surely realize in just a few short decades. Maybe she’d remember this moment then. Fondly, I hoped.
“Couldn’t you just catch snails and let them slime your face?”
“Great idea! Who wouldn’t want autonomous, slow-moving cheesegraters, with thousands of razor-sharp teeth, on their face? Which might not even stop at exfoliating the said face the way they’d rasped my orchids, but head straight for the jugular to avenge the enslaved and the crushed.”
“So?” daughter said. “Imagine the clickbait headlines: Aging Writer Seeking Smooth Skin and Fame Regrets Snail Abuse! You might even get mentioned in the same sentence as Patricia Highsmith. Who actually loved her snails, keeping 300 of them in her garden and taking a hundred or so to dinner parties in her handbag, before smuggling them all to France. Six or ten snails at a time, under her breasts.”
“Only 300? Hogwash. Did she feed them contraceptives? Otherwise she would’ve had 100,000 snails within a year. 100 in a handbag? Ten under her breasts? Inside a bag or a bra, stressing and sliming? She would’ve been drenched and reeking of dead snails by the time she’d reached dessert. Or Paris. Then again, her boobs might’ve been perkier.”
Daughter made a disgusted face. I wasn’t sure if it was due to the suffering snails, or her mom using words like “boobs” and “perkier.”
“Can’t you at least catch and release them in a nice meadow?”
“A nice meadow in the middle of Lisbon?”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” daughter said, tiring of the mother-daughter talk. “What’s for lunch?”
“Escargot,” I said. But only in my mind.
Tua Laine’s first novel was published in Finnish in 2020 and English in 2022. Her short stories have appeared online and in print on both sides of the Atlantic. She holds an MA in English and Russian literature, and has lived in several countries, including 29 years in Alabama.
Gerburg Garmann is a former professor of Global Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies at the University of Indianapolis. Her scholarly publications appear in English, German, and French in international journals. Her artwork and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies around the world. She specializes in creating art for women. For more information please visit