open air and the uncertain threat of the human gaze, advances with all the determination of a slow, purposeful traveller. Its body glistens, iridescent and impossibly soft, an undulant muscle pressing against the moist concrete that probably seems, to the snail, endless and mysterious as a desert. The shell rides atop this living wave: a spiral of ocher and brown, battered but unbroken, a living memory of every crash and collision the creature has survived. Its two antennae sweep forward, groping the world, pulling every molecule of scent and taste into its unknowable mind. The trail it leaves behind is a trembling lustre, a reminder of the journey and the cost of movement. Each infinitesimal advancement is a labour, a risk, a testament to endurance. It occurred to me that the snail doesn’t know I am here; or rather, it doesn’t care, assigns me to the column of static obstacles, like the rain smoothed granite curbs. If this were a story, perhaps the snail would symbolize something: the stageless grinding of existence, the optimism of persistence. But in the story of the pavement, the snail is not the hero; its struggle is unremarked upon by every passing foot, its survival a function of being overlooked or considered beneath care…

© KD.W.Heim