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Lying in Darkness
by Anna King

The girl sits on a swing, dangling her legs. In her hand is a bucket with fourteen snails in it, some crawling up the sides (what word instead of crawl, the girl wonders?), some curled up inside their shells like a wad of gum. The girl has been watching the snail with the dark brown shell and curved yellow patch on its back for five minutes. The snail's reaching eyes wave at her, testing the air, and only retract briefly when she brushes a finger over them.

The girl tries swinging next, fast, then slower, to see if that makes the snail shrink away. Tentacles, the girl thinks. In water do snails slide out of their shells? Would they glide in ripples like a water snake?

This snail, the girl thinks, is an explorer. She remembers briefly a word from a book her father used to read to her, a great book, but a bit scary (very scary, she admits), about a girl and her brother who wear capes and run off to save their little brother Jacob from a terrible monster-man (who isn't really that terrible, but the girl always forgets this). The girl admires the cape-wearing brother and sister because they are not afraid of anything and like exploring in murky bogs. The word she is thinking of is exciting and clever and hovers around the brother and sister like a vaporous cloud. Years later, lying in darkness while the man she left her husband for mutters in his sleep beside her, the word 'intrepid' will come to her suddenly, but she will not remember why it feels important, or why it reminds her of snails.

The girl with the snails stops swinging and puts the bucket down. There is no use being a snail, she thinks, if you are not going to be an explorer.

She lies down on the grass to the left of the swing where the ground is covered in inedible nuts, which the girl likes opening to squeeze the liquid out of the green flesh. The girl spends hours lying on her belly in the yard, imagining shrinking to grasshopper size and climbing flower stalks and following ants. Raspberries, she knows, would be enough for a dinner; they would be like edible stools. She loves this image.

The girl has a friend who is coming over soon and will bring her pet rat in her shirt. The rat is way too fat, the girl knows, and has yellow teeth. Still, the rat is so allied to the friend it won't leave her for even a second and this gives the girl great respect for her friend, even though the existence of the rat, and of all the animals at the friend's house (three cats, one dog, two rabbits in the backyard) makes the friend's house smell gross. But—and the girl is not sure why she knows this—it is also the friend's parents that make the house smell bad: their damp anger and apathy, their cups of coffee left on top of the TV, their brown corduroy pants worn thin at the knees.

The girl wonders if the rat would eat the snail – if they put them together in the bucket and if she would looked away. There are things she knows she is supposed to be upset by, like when her neighbour was blowing up slugs with firecrackers and little grey blobs peppered the bike ramp in front of the girl's house.

Or when her brother accidentally sat on a newborn chick, a brown one, and her father had to snap its neck to kill it. Or when, at the end of lunch hour, after a delirium of sap-collecting, dead bird-burying and TV tag has left the girl rambling erratically behind the portables, she traps crane flies against the aluminium siding and pulls off their wings and legs, one by one, until all that's left is a quivering brown body and a bobbing head, and she thinks of words she knows she will know the meaning of some day. Precarious. Immaculate. Chrysalis.

Anna King has been on Forget an infamous two times.