Memoir Of A Snail -2024- Apr 2026
My mother, a gentle hoarder of teabags and sympathy cards, died in a department store escalator accident when we were seven. My father, a one-armed magician (lost the arm to a pet crocodile in Alice Springs), drank himself into a quiet coma by the time we were nine. Gilbert and I were sent to live with a woman named Phyliss, a chain-smoking ex-trapeze artist who kept her dead poodle, François, in the freezer. “He’s just resting,” she’d say, patting the icebox.
Memoir of a Snail Logline: A melancholic, rhythmically tapping woman named Grace Pudel looks back on a life of hoarding, loss, and twinless twinship, discovering that a soft, slow existence is not a weakness but a strange, beautiful form of survival. Part One: The Spiral Begins My name is Grace. Grace Pudel. I live inside a spiral. Not a literal one—though my house is a caravan that my late husband, a retired clown, spun into a donut shape before he died. No, I mean a real spiral. A snail’s shell of memory. I tap my wedding ring— tap, tap, tap —on the glass of my terrarium. Three snails inside: Sylvia, Peggy, and the late, great Kenneth. They don’t mind the tapping. They’re good listeners.
People ask me if I’m lonely. I tell them: lonely is just a word for people who haven’t learned to listen to the quiet. A snail’s memoir isn’t loud. It’s a wet, shining line on a dark pavement. And if you follow it long enough—past the fish-and-chips shop, past the caravan, past the dead clown and the frozen poodle—you’ll find someone tapping their ring on a glass jar, smiling. Memoir of a Snail -2024-
After that, I stopped leaving the caravan. I grew a small garden of moss on the windowsill. I stopped showering. I wrote letters to Gilbert I never mailed. The shoeboxes multiplied—under the bed, in the oven, inside the toilet tank. I became a snail: soft, shelled, withdrawing at the slightest touch.
I was born in 1954 in Coburg, a suburb of Melbourne that smelled of damp wool and lamb chops. My twin brother, Gilbert, came out first—kicking, screaming, grabbing at the forceps. I came out second, wrapped in my own amniotic sac. The nurses called me a “caulbearer.” Said it meant I’d never drown. They didn’t mention loneliness. My mother, a gentle hoarder of teabags and
I searched through my shoeboxes for three days. On the fourth day, I found it: a tiny lockbox I’d forgotten. Inside was a photograph I’d stolen from Phyliss’s house years ago. It was a picture of my mother, pregnant with us. She was smiling. She had a snail on her shoulder. On the back, in her handwriting: “Two hearts. One muscle. Slow and steady.”
I realized something that morning, watching Sylvia the snail leave a silver trail across my thumb: grief is not a shell. It’s a foot. You ripple forward. Millimeter by millimeter. You leave a little of yourself behind, but you keep going. I’m sixty-nine now. I still live in the caravan. The snails have great-grandchildren. I clean the shoeboxes once a year, then put them back. Gilbert came to visit last Christmas. He brought Socrates the goat’s great-great-grandson. The goat ate my curtains. I didn’t mind. “He’s just resting,” she’d say, patting the icebox
“Hello, Sylvia. Tell me something slow.” Stop-motion animation of a single snail crossing a piano keyboard. Each key it touches plays a sad, sweet note. Then a second snail joins it. Then a third. They move in a spiral. The final frame: a hand reaching down, palm open. The snails climb aboard. Fade to black.
We married in a registry office. He wore a polka-dot bow tie. I wore a snail brooch Gilbert had sent me. Ken and I moved into his caravan, parked on a vacant lot next to a fish-and-chips shop. We had no children. We had snails. Kenneth (the snail, not the husband) was our first. Ken the husband would read aloud to them from The Hobbit . “They’re listening,” he’d say. “Slowly.” Ken died on a Tuesday. Aneurysm. He was trying to fix a leak in the caravan roof during a heatwave. I found him face-down in a puddle of his own lemonade. The funeral was me, a priest who’d never met him, and the snails. I didn’t cry. I just tapped my ring.
And then, a key. A small, tarnished key.
I wrote to Gilbert every week. He wrote back on napkins. His letters were hopeful in a way that broke my heart. “They’ve got a goat here named Socrates. He headbutts the chaplain. I think you’d like him.”