The Spanish Slug

A thick trail of slime had appeared from underneath the kitchen door, stretching up the wall to the shelves.  It was the middle of the night and I’d been struggling to sleep so had come down for a drink.  Alarmed that something had got into the food store I opened the cupboard doors and peered inside.  There was movement of some kind coming from behind the tins of beans and tuna, but in the poor light I couldn’t see very much.  Cautiously I moved the tins to one side and that’s when I saw him, the biggest slug I’d ever seen in my life.  I broke out in a cold sweat.

It was about 15cm long and oozing its way through the back of the cupboard.  It had a light brown foot and bright orange skirting.  Its long optical tentacles waved slowly back and forth in the gloom as it continued on its way, taking little notice of me, as it searched for something to munch on.  It was the infamous Spanish slug recently in the news for thriving in the UK.  Not the first time I’d seen one of these creatures, but certainly the biggest one I’d come across.

I got some kitchen roll and caught hold of it so that its huge body collapsed and rolled in on itself.  Even in this defensive state it was the size of a tennis ball which I carried to the kitchen door.  It was pulsating between my fingers as I hurriedly unlocked the door and lobbed it into the back garden.  I went to the sink and scrubbed my hand free of the brown slime that had soaked through the tissue.

*****

Later that night I had this horrible feeling the super slug had re-entered the house.  This time there was trail of slime up the wall near the window, so I pulled back the curtain to see where the creature had gone.  There was a crack in the wall into which the mucus trail led and I put my fingers and hands into it, prizing it apart.  I pushed my head into the opening and in the distance I could see something shimmering so I crawled inside.  There was building debris and brick dust and then a thousand moths surrounded me with noise, calling me all the names under the sun – except there was no sun.

I pushed onwards through a mirror pool of mercury emptied from old thermometers, through the petrified celebrity trinkets that hung from the ceiling, through a valley of five legged worms that pulled me in every direction, through the bad memories until the terrible guilt was gone and then, finally, I found king slug, sat aloft a throne of solidified slime, his voice boomed out in anger.

“Why have you followed me here?”

“Because I need to know what you are,” I said, rising up from all fours.

A slow and ugly smile spread across his face.  “Don’t you realise?  I am part of you and you are part of me.  You are the perfect host, and I am the perfect parasite.  We co-exist, you and I, living off each other.”

With that I visualised the ever present exploitation and could hardly speak for the anger and frustration of it all. 

“You’ve been holding me back for years, feeding off me like a cancer that never kills, but brings the illness.”

I smashed a sharp quartz crystal from a rock and picked it up.  I let the darkness sparkle on its razor blade structure.

“Ha! You haven’t got the guts,” slithered king slug.

And with that I lunged at the monstrosity and sliced and diced its soft underbelly into a thousand pieces.  The cavern was filled with the groans of a dying scum bag and the globules of yellow green slime flew all around me like ejaculated freedoms.  And when I’d finished the onslaught I dropped back against a smooth boulder and surveyed the scene.  The barbed structures of this underworld all covered in the remains of my foul deed, until I let the moment glide away, and dreamt of falling beneath a parachute to a freedom I could never have.