Memoir Of A Snail - -2024-

Then, at nineteen, I met Ken. Ken was a retired clown who smelled of musty wool and mothballs. He had a red foam nose he never wore—said it chafed. He drove a caravan shaped like a teardrop. He told terrible puns. “What do you call a snail on a ship? A snailor!” I laughed so hard I cried. That was the first time in years I’d done both at the same time.

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. Memoir of a Snail -2024-

I started collecting things. Not stamps or coins. Feelings . I’d find objects that smelled of loss: a single sequin from a forgotten dress, a button from a dead man’s coat, a torn photo of someone else’s birthday. I lined them in shoeboxes. I’d talk to them. “You’re safe now,” I’d whisper to a rusty key. “Someone left you, but I won’t.” Then, at nineteen, I met Ken