Molluscophobia (a haibun)

My youngest is terrified of snails and slugs so if we walk to school on a rainy morning I often have to scout ahead. I always venture the same arguments — that they are absolutely tiny and we are mighty giants; that a snail never bit anybody's foot off, not even those massive tropical ones. But, to use the old Oxbridge debater fallacy, you can't rationalise somebody, especially a child, out of a position they weren't rationalised into.

Snails and slugs are slow, writhing anomalies in a city full of things that flutter, stomp or scuttle. They criss-cross pavements with their posterial mucus. Their eyes pop in and out of their heads and their heads are but a slight variation on the rest of their body. Like a brain that somehow managed to survive outside the skull with the eyeballs perched on top of taut optic nerves. Creeping absurdities given flesh. Of course it is right to be terrified.

I once watched a documentary in which two slugs wrestled while hanging from “a rope of mucus”. According to David Attenborough, snails are hermaphroditic but still have to swap genetic material in order to reproduce. Once they are suitably entwined, their penii unfurl from the sides of their heads and also entwine into a “translucent, fanlike globe.” I thought about telling this to my youngest in the hope that she would see this as interesting enough for her curiosity to gazump her fear. But in the end I refrained because it's effin' diabolical.

The only snail I found this morning was one that had already been stepped on, probably by one of the workmen digging up the same stretch of road to install full-fibre broadband. A crushed slug is barely recognisable as such, just a smear of slimy viscera. A snail is different though. The intricate wreckage of the shell — like a toddler has just ripped up a sheet of paper with the fibonacci sequence written on it by a master calligrapher.