This is a story about one Snegma “Sneg” Ramsay (Snegory to my parents).
Once a snail fell from the sky and it taught me about love. “Fell from the sky” is a fanciful way of saying that I dropped him by mistake when I found him in my kitchen sink. I thought that he was a clump of mince, he was so small back then, and when I picked him up I realised that his shell was badly broken. A large fragment came away in my trembling hands, but the poor creature seemed blissfully unaware of the death sentence it had just suffered. He was barely one centimetre long and resilient, moist; unbothered. I knew what had to be done.
Google: how to look after a VERY talented snail?
Google: broken snail shell repair diy
Lesson One: You can never mend everything.
Fortunately, it seems like the field of Malacology (the study of molluscs: slugs, snails, mussels, clams, octopuses and more) has progressed since Sneg’s injury in that fateful summer of ‘21. These days we know that garden snails such as Sneg, or Cornu aspersum, can recover from chips and holes in their shells. Back then? Google told me to put him out of his misery. Even the snail-keeping forums said it was certain death. To freeze them, drown them, get them drunk on beer first (fun fact: snails and slugs can be lured with beer. Do not abuse this knowledge) and then euthanise by force. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I’d had to euthanise a mouse earlier that year. It had crawled onto my doorstep, seizing, dragging its hind legs limply, a tiny dark puddle of urine slowly spilling onto the stone step; and I realised the infirmary box I’d prepared for her would be her coffin. Best practice is to manually break the spinal cord and I still remember how her cervical vertebrae felt in my hands before I made her go limp. I thought of where she was buried in the garden and how I didn’t want to do it again. By that point, the teensy snail had made its way onto my finger. Its eyestalks waved around, and I looked back, and before I knew it Sneg had a name and he needed to live. Beneath his exposed shell I glimpsed membranous organs quivering. I wanted to kiss it better but that would probably kill him, so instead I put him in a takeaway container with some veggies and whispered some nice words.
Lesson Two: But time will one day mend all.
Snails can’t live without their shells and they’re much more complex creatures than you’d think, as I came to learn. They’ve got lungs and a heart that beats to circulate hemolymph (something quite like blood) plus kidneys and livers and all that good stuff to boot. They breathe oxygen through their pneumostome (breathing pore) that great big hole on the side of snails that you might’ve wondered about. Their anus, or butthole, is riiiight next to it due to the snails’ torsion (being a slug but twisty) so by a beautiful feat of nature they shit right on their own heads. The shell is secreted constantly through a snail’s life, and it starts growing from the base of the spiral, not the centre. Sneg’s shell had chipped away close to the apex. It would take a long time to heal naturally, and he’d surely dry out or get an infection well before then. Snail shells are mostly made from calcium carbonate, which they get from their environment. Kauri snails, for example, will cannibalise other snails and eat their shells for the gains. Some people had success with feeding their frail snails cuttlebones, which is the mantle of another mollusc so that makes sense. However, it was lockdown in 2021, and I was fresh out of cuttle. This meant hours of grinding down chicken eggshells (carefully boiled and sanitised) into a fine powder with a mortar and pestle, before sprinkling a nice line of calcium onto a carrot for my new slippery friend. I cooed words of encouragement a la Esio Trot and carefully bandaged his shell fragments back together as best as I could. Glad Wrap and duct tape was a shit idea, but I also had these leftover Second Skin dressings ‘cos I’d been through a lot too, and they were a brilliant idea. I fed him eggs and love and tiny drops of water and I watched him heal.
Lesson Three: SLIME.
Snails produce mucus constantly, which includes different kinds for slithering and for keeping their body moist. I went through a breakup not long after adopting Sneg, and found myself also producing a lot of mucus. Oh my god, SO much mucus. Perhaps, like a snail, this could mucus also be purposeful? I was not a snot goblin bound to a pile of blankets. I could be a slime lord, in touch with my emotions, shamelessly damp in the fresh air. Oh, Sneg, your slime trails were a mirror in which I saw myself. I don’t know dude, things got weird for me for a bit.
Lesson Four : Fuck it, treat yourself.
I ended up following my own mucus trail down to Dunedin, and not long after, Sneg followed. He quickly became the world’s most spoiled snail, and discovered he could get away with only eating the tender inside core of the carrot wheels I would slice for him. Sneg would sit in the middle of the carrot and scrape at the middle with his radula – these cute little mouth parts that molluscs have (they tickle) – and leave a hollow orange donut behind. He could munch on the base of a bok choy for weeks, but carrots made his eyestalks move in a way I decided to read as joyful. My mum had driven Sneg down to Dunedin for me, and his takeaway container home quickly got upgraded to a miniature glasshouse terrarium palace. I filled the base with a soft mulch lovingly robbed from my neighbour’s yard, and kitted it out with tiny patio furniture and snail-safe plants like basil and mint. Holy shit, did Sneg love basil. I let so many New World potted basils die in Sneg’s cottage. I’d plant them in his cottage one week and make some bolognese, and within a couple weeks I’d find him slithered onto the topmost leaf of the waning plant, nibbling massive holes in the greenery mockingly. How I adored him. On a grocery run one day, when I realised that I was about to splurge on the fancy teensy organic carrots for my snail,
I found myself staring at them, thinking that I too might deserve nice things. It started with me eating fancy carrots with my snail, and eventually led to me finding someone who’d cook me dinner and keep some veggie cuttings aside for my snail.
Lesson Five: Sometimes it’s good to hide away in your shell.
I kept diligently feeding Sneg calcium and, over time, the chunk in his shell healed over with a thin white membrane. I’d upgraded from chicken eggshells to powdered calcium supplement ($25, measured out in snail-sizes with a spoon I crafted from a paper straw) which I shook over his food and enclosure. He drank from a porcelain sauce dish, constantly kept with a shallow supply of water, because if it covers their pneumostome they drown. I wiped up all his tiny shits, because he loved to shit on the walls and run through it. His head constantly got shat on, but sometimes life does that to you. He used to bobble his eyestalks when he saw food, he got excited around water, and he used to like slithering on me but he didn’t like other people as much. Snails make foam when they’re unhappy, and if he foamed at people they did not pass my vibe check. He spent most of his time buried in the dirt to keep himself moist, which led to regular panics where I’d thought that he’d escaped, just to find him buried in the dirt somewhere, chilling, shitting on his own head, minding his business (ha). As he grew up, I watched the scarred chalky-white segment move further and further up the coil of his shell, and it comparatively became a smaller and smaller part of him over the course of his life. Wonder if that means something. I had him for almost three years, and watched him grow from an almost transparent little clump, easily mistaken for mince, to an adult snail the size of a $2 coin, own house on his back and everything. There were times where I didn’t care to feed myself, but I did because I had to make something for Sneg. I could’ve kept my curtains closed forever, but I had to let the sunlight in so my precious fucking snail could bask for a bit. I gave him a good life, and I guess he gave me one too.
Lesson Six: Grief is a spiral. Also the cops will get called if you cry too loud, apparently.
Sneg passed in a heatwave a couple summers ago. I’d done my best to take care of him, and when I found him buried deep in the dry earth, unresponsive and mucusless, I was crushed. Absolutely distraught. If you’ve made it this far and have basic reading comprehension, you have figured out that I am not the most stable person. When my snail died, it added fuel to what was beginning to become a deep depression. Somewhere out there, a psych team has notes on me where I disclosed a “sneath in the snamily.” A lot of them thought I was nuts, a few got the message that there is no love like that between an autistic and their pet vermin, and that the right snail in the wrong place taught me a lot about how there’s no correct speed to live your life. Recovering was a slow and patient process, and it took me a long time to mourn Sneg, too. I kept his shell on the mantle for a while, but shattered it last year coming home drunk and had an absolute meltdown. The neighbours called in a noise complaint (come on, bro) and I had to explain to two very impatient cops while I was very much in my dressing gown that I was mourning my long dead snail, and, secondarily, my youth. The cops left pretty quick. I was, again, left with a broken snail’s shell. And this time I couldn’t fix it. But I didn’t need to (because he was dead). I watched that segment of my life spiral further and further away.
I don’t have a lot to remember my dead snail by, physically at least. But he taught me a lot for a creature that doesn’t even have a brain (they have to call it “cerebral ganglion” instead, it’s honestly tragic) and he’s managed to live on. I find him in my increased optimism, my appreciation for the slow majesty of healing, and as a central figure in tales about love that I drunkenly swap with strangers. Love is a legacy. A snegacy.