MORNING SLUG

I go to pick up the metal dog bowls after a night of rain. A small slug, about an inch long, clings to the side of Ellie’s bowl. Its antennae are extended, it creeps tentatively forward. What is it searching for? Do slugs eat kibble? Does it seek a smooth, dry surface after so much water? The warmth of the metal bowl in the morning sun?

I pick up the bowls, one in each hand, and absent-mindedly clang them together, thinking to dislodge the slug so I won’t have to deal with it. It clings harder, rung with the bell of the stainless steel bowls struck together, its whole body engulfed in the single reality of that sound. And I, too, am, literally, struck by that sound in that moment. I imagine a moment in my world where the whole planet is struck against a twin of itself, only hollow and metallic, the calamitous gonging that engulfs my entire body, everything I know shaken and reverberating, obliterating every other sound, every possible explanation. And I think of Hiroshima, and car wrecks and of ‘smart bombs’ – that’s me, a “smart” bomb, quotation marks and all. And I cannot stand to do it harm, to rid my world of any other single living thing. Only there is no place for a slug (even though the garden is filled with them, what’s one more?) I can’t bring myself to deliberately put a slug in the garden, and I can’t bring myself to kill it, although I’ve already tried. So I carry it inside and put the dog bowls down on the butcher block counter. I fill the bowls, making sure to put in the vitamins and the joint supplements, as the slug makes its way off the bowl and onto the wood. I feed the dogs in their slug-free bowls and step quickly back into the kitchen because the slug is suddenly making rapid progress toward the Cuisinart and I don’t want it there, or anywhere.

I slide the corner of a piece of stiff paper under it and jiggle it onto the card. I don’t want to deal with this creature. I don’t want to have to handle any other life and death crisis, no matter whose, I don’t want the fact of the dilemma to intrude into my already over-crowded life, like the overcrowded counter top, too many indispensable things, too many choices, too many conveniences.

I carry it to the fence and tell it it’s going for another ride, with a steep drop in it, and wonder how slugs do with steep drops even as I am tipping the card over the fence into my neighbor’s yard, into the hedge they never trim, knowing what a stupid gesture this is, that there is nothing preventing it from crawling back through the spaces in the fence and coming straight to my compost, my plum tree, and, yes, the dog bowls, a mere 8 or 10 feet away. A day’s walk for a slug, surely.

And as I tip the slug over to its oblivion (oblivion only for me) I remember my son’s dream two years ago, about this neighbor and this fence: In the dream, a toxic gray fog forms in the neighbor’s yard and drifts between the spaces in the fence into our yard, spreading from there throughout the neighborhood. The poison fog can go everywhere, there is no escape.

I go inside and wash the sticky slug mucous off my thumb and forefinger. I didn’t want to touch it. I did everything I could to avoid getting the mucous on my hand. But there is no avoiding touching everything, hurting things I don’t want to think about, no way to create an impermeable fence, or even a filtering one. The poison is everywhere and we don’t know how to live with or without it.