When Claudia picks up the snail, her mother sighs from behind the poolside bougainvillea. ‘Claudia,' she starts as the five-year-old totters over, places the snail directly onto the open bloom of one of her prized roses, ‘what are you doing?'

 

Claudia looks up, says, ‘he wants to go there, mum,' in her cherub's voice, like something out of a Disney princess movie. Claudia's mother swallows the urge to correct her, say you can't possibly know where a snail wants to go, Claudia, just put him back down on the ground, keep him off my damn roses, don't you know how much time it takes to cultivate such big flowers with those tight, plump petals the colour of cake icing? Couldn't you be just like your brother and sister and care less about the snails? But Claudia's mother doesn't do that. She just lets Claudia do her thing, and the snail moves with all the slow-motion grace it can muster over the flower, its fat body swaying the bud, and when Claudia's not looking, when she returns to the sandpit they can't get the neighbours' cat to stop pissing in, Claudia's mother picks up the snail by the shell, drops in onto the ground and crushes it under one foot.

 

The victory is short lived. A week later, Claudia emerges from her bedroom with a plastic take-away container, filled with soil. There are, much to her mother's chagrin, three mud-coloured snails inside. The snails' names, Claudia says, are Simon, Maude and Baby. Claudia had discovered the art of snail rearing from a book borrowed from her school library entitled ‘Care of Pet Snails'. Claudia had read the book from cover to cover, and all on her own had constructed the habitat enclosure suggested on page eleven—a container with holes stabbed into it with scissors in a way that makes the broken plastic stick up into the air like ragged teeth. Step two on page eight—‘Asking Your Parents'—had apparently been deemed unnecessary.

 

Every day Claudia places food scraps into the box—bits of carrot and apple and lettuce leftover from her packed lunchbox. For weeks it's like that; Claudia tends to the snails every morning, leaves the box by her bedroom window during the day while at school. Claudia's mother resists the urge to churn some salt through the sand habitat, let the snails fizzle from the inside out, or otherwise throw the whole fetid container into the rubbish. She resists the urge even when the container turns foggy, as if the snail slime has condensed onto the container's edges to form its own atmosphere; she resists it even when the container begins to smell of mold. Because this isn't Claudia's mother's first rodeo; she knows her child's boredom will outrun her sense of obligation to the snails eventually. With all the wildness taken out of them, she knows Claudia will forget about the snails sooner or later. So one morning, after one of the snails lets out a bubbling trail of yellow poop, Claudia says to her mother she doesn't want to look after the snails anymore. Her mother turns to her, says ‘no worries, let me take them for you.' And Claudia allows it to happen, presses the stinking, soiled container into her mother's hands, watches her mother walk to the open window of her pink-walled bedroom and, in one grand motion, loose the entire contents of the container—snails and all—into the neighbour's bricked backyard, the ones with the cat that pees, constantly, in her sandbox.

 

Mara Papavassiliou lives in Western Australia, where she is inspired by abandoned mine sites and the gothic landscape of the Great Western Woodlands. She has been published in the Centre for Stories' Under the Paving Stones, the Beach anthology, Locative Magazine and in the first issue of the little journal. She was a 2023 KSP Writers' Centre writer-in-residence.