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Show Motherlunge a novel 230 Once the coffee began to brew, I would open the kitchen door and step into the small backyard. There, for the first time in my life and in a sad and half-acknowledged rite of fertility, I had planted flowers. The neighbor's pitbull, Knuckles, who was chained to his plywood doghouse, would go apeshit with joy for my company. But the snails, the snails! Symmetrical and cozy, little cinnamon rolls rolling over the grass and into my flowerbeds. Their tasteful neutral colors, their naturalness. Their feelers waving languidly, like parade balloons with their lengthy anchoring filaments, miming we are friends of children everywhere. The snails. Squatting on my haunches, I would pincer each one up, index finger and thumb. The snail's soft body-moist and raffle-edged-would relinquish its embrace with a soft r and familiar mouth noise, then withdraw inside its shell. I would huck the snail over the fence. I would listen-ear cartilage metaphorically inclined, tongue pulsing over lower teeth-for the wet smack of its shell on the asphalt parking lot next door. Then I would look at Knuckles, now standing like a coffee table with his legs spread wide, peeing furiously. And where that snail had come from: a glistening silver trail across the leaves and loam, dead-ended. At work Charmaine told me that if you smashed snails you released their sacks of snail eggs. You actually speed up the reproductive process, she told me, by killing them the way I was doing. Charmaine's mother is a master gardener. She'd been married three times, to men with boats and golf club memberships. She'd produced a daughter each time. Charmaine's mother, I didn't doubt, had given her this fact about the snails along with other occult feminine knowledge such as how to care for linen, how to keep silver from |