I pushed the curtains back as I closed the bedroom window.

There was snail on the ceiling!

We live in a two storey building, this was on the top floor

I tugged the snail off the plaster, intending to return it to the garden.

The shell was dry and empty.

Just a beautiful shell, still ‘stuck’ to the ceiling.

I wonder what possessed this little creature.

To climb higher and higher.

Further away from the lush, dewy, green below.

Wonder at it’s epic, futile, journey to ‘the top’.

At how it crept, into the dry, heated, air of the house, through the open window, and just stopped there.

Hanging, improbably, upside-down.

Defying gravity.

At those last days. Spent in absolute stillness.

Just, slowly, drying out.

I wonder at how there is no part of it’s soft body left.

Nothing at all.

Just a clean, hard, spiralling, empty shell for me to find.

An object, if made by an artist, I would marvel at in a gallery.

This little snail’s legacy.


Kat Robertson. October 2020

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