Silvery Moon

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There is a round moon shaped circle in the middle of the carpet.



I discovered the circle when I lifted up the glass bowl: the circle glints like a fallen moon on the carpet, or like a magical silvered fairy ring. It looks like it should have been created by an ethereal creature, but that is not the case, it has been made by…

a slug!

This silvered shrine is from the slime from a slug: an evil creature whose imperilled life I could not take and which found itself flying through the air into the garden of the empty house next door moments later.

Slugs occasionally attach themselves to the bin bags that I have to carry through the house. This one must have fallen off and slithered under the settee. For weeks I’d followed its trail moving furniture away from walls and lifting carpets to peer into crevices all to no avail. How a slug could live without food or water was astonishing, but live it did, leaving its silver trails as an unsettling sickening taunt.


The teenager spotted the slug late one night just after I’d fallen into a blissful sleep. He woke me up to say that he’s spotted, it and demanded that I should go downstairs at once and deal with it.
I was too tired to do so.

‘You do it,’ I said closing my eyes as I tried to drift off again.

The teenager protested loudly for about fifteen minutes.

‘Just get a wine glass and cover it,’ I suggested.

‘No you do it,’ the teenager moaned.

‘Just get a glass I repeated.

Eventually he left, and I was able to drift back into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, I discovered that instead of a wine glass my large glass mixing bowl had been used to cover the slug; and that the creature had obviously wandered round and round, and also across the central space under its domed prison in an attempt to escape.

I couldn’t kill it, much as I loathe slugs and detest the way that they eat some of my favourite plants leaving me with a garden devoid of sunflowers.

Instead, I released it into the wilderness next door, hoping that it would not return.

It won't come back will it?
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