[Fiction] Under a Flowerpot at the Edge of the Garden

By Moshe Schaffzin

The day in the life of a snail is best spent in a dark, shady corner. From your own gastropodal point of view, it is much preferable to hide away than to be crushed under the feet of two-legged beanstalks. You know this intimately, as you spend your sleepy afternoons under the dome of an overturned flowerpot.

 Nevertheless, it doesn’t take long before you find yourself bored of the safety the hideaway affords you. Despite your straightforward nature, even snails crave some variety in their lives. Slowly, you slide towards the edge of the pot and wedge yourself under its brim. You’re actually quite strong for your small size, despite how you may appear. If you were a more complicated organism, perhaps you would feel anger or jealousy towards other species, the ants for instance, for being considered the “strong” garden creature when it is you who that title should be attributed to. But instead, you are simple and your lifestyle only requires three emotions of you: contentment, hunger and fear. 

The midday sun blinds you as you stretch your small body into the bright open, recoiling your long eyestalks in response. As soon as you think you’ve adjusted to the light, your senses are immediately overwhelmed by a loud honk vibrating through your body. Glancing to the side, you see rows and rows of those big carrier animals the two-legged beanstalks are always riding inside of, their round, rubber feet steaming in the heat of the afternoon. That honk you felt probably came from one of them, though you have yet to figure out if their call is for mating or aggression. Considering how frightful they are, it's probably the latter.

The forgotten flowerpot had been left on the side of a lawn. The small patch of grass where you stand constitutes the front garden of the two-legged beanstalks’ dens. Two of them live here, this much you have observed since your arrival in a bag of organic fertilizer. Being ripped from your beloved forest home in such a way was frightening to say the least, and not a second goes by where you don’t miss the feeling of deep roots beneath your mollusk foot. This new, much too loud world is awfully scary. You feel the vibrations of the overwhelming noise through your skin. Is this any place for a bug like you?

You weigh your options. You could either stay in this pathetic excuse for a forest where the tallest plant is an overgrown tulip, or you could try to find your way home. It doesn’t take much deliberation for you to decide you’d rather be sitting under the sprawling leaves of a mighty oak than hiding under flowerpots. You're not entirely sure which direction to go in, but it's really all the same to you when you can’t see but a few feet in front of yourself. 

You slither across the grass, the chill of the morning dew bathing your body in cool mist before taking the plunge into what you know will be an unbearable heat. You make it to the paved sidewalk, whose ambient heat burns as you slide across it, before stopping dead in your tracks.

The sizzling hot blacktop.

You smell the sickly stench of the carrier animals’ breath, pulling your head into your shell anxiously as your stomach churns. They have no reason to want to eat you, right?

You test the temperature of the road and immediately recoil, but in the back of your mind your memories of the forest call to you…

It’s now or never, you think, home or bust.

You take a deep breath and poke your head out of the protection of your shell and begin a mad dash across the road. Straining your tiny mollusk foot, you force it to carry you as fast as possible, veering left and right to dodge debris left carelessly on the blacktop, coffee cups, plastic wrappers, sure that sparks are flying off your body at the force of your momentum. 

All of a sudden, you feel it. The familiar thrum of the carrier beasts’ fiery bellies rattling through you. You desperately try to go faster, faster, faster, feeling the sting of roadburn as you make it past the first bar in the crosswalk. The carrier beasts begin to shift, edging closer, closer, closer to the edge of the crosswalk before...

#

Your shell is pinched by two sticky fingers, and you’re lifted off of your foot into the air, your head spinning as the black pavement disappears beneath you. Have you been snatched up by a cardinal looking for a late morning snack? Hit by a carrier beast and sent flying? Whisked away to become a kindergartener’s pet?

You’re dazed and confused and have lost track of where in the world you are, up until your body is slammed down on the soft prickly earth of the front garden. In front of you stands a two-legged beanstalk with black hair gathered into two pigtails that remind you of your own eyestalks.

“Careful little guy!” The beanstalk says, “Roads aren’t safe for bugs like you. The garden is much nicer.”

The beanstalk toddles away, the force of their footsteps sending uncomfortable thrums through your body with every step, their small wave goodbye little comfort. The fear in your chest subsides as you slither your way back towards the flowerpot. Under the shade of the overgrown tulip, you feel…something you’ve never felt before.

Disappointment?

Loneliness?

Homesickness?

Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel good. Oh well, you’ll probably forget about it by tomorrow morning. You’re a simple creature, after all.

Moshe Schaffzin is an Ohio-born writer and lover of the environment who is currently earning a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Living and working in Guelph, Ontario with their cat, Moshe writes climate fiction, solarpunk and nature-based poetry.