The Shell

When you were quite small, dreamy, and amoral, you would root around in your mother’s garden. Tepid smooth tomato skins caught between your baby teeth, tickled by the acrid furry smell of vines. Innumerable aphids and ladybugs eggs down the hatch, never to take flight. Underleaf, glided snails. Across your small palm they trekked, slower even, than the raindrops you traced down the bedroom windowglass, slicker too. The snails were your first geometry teachers, lecturing you in golden logarithmic ratios, carrying you inward along some tiny celestial axis. Fractals emerged before your vocabulary could keep up, and you understood, at once, a fantastic secret.

Before you now, sylvan tendrils of mist rise from the sunhot meadow, exhales of earth to the dark relief of night. Lanterns of many styles are strung here and there, stained glass, and thin paper; pure shimmering crystal sending shards of light into the surrounding copse. Candles abound, hanging improbably from intricate cobweb wire, illuminating the silken paisley canopies. Strange windows cast strange reliefs from the structure before you which, of course, is a shell. Someone a little clever, or quite more than a little mad, has enchanted a snail shell to grow to the size of a small potting shed, intimidatingly tall and ungainly, nonetheless.