Tale of the Snail

In Rome, the shell which you see pictured three posts below, which I had thought was very pretty and thus had been carrying around in my make-up bag for three weeks, suddenly produced a snail. I was terribly confused and disgusted to see what looked like snot emerging from the make-up bag, and so I quickly threw the shell to the floor of the train. It proceeded to crawl, very slowly, back up the wall toward me while I alternated shuddering, giggling, murmuring words of disbelief to the universe, and then looking around nonchalantly at my fellow passengers, who merely stared quizzically back. It's a good thing they didn't look down.

What happened to the snail, you ask? First, I put him back in my make-up bag before the conductor came around. Those guys get livid when you so much as put your feet up on the seats; there's no telling what they might do to a wayward mollusk. I left some room for breathing but not so much that he might emerge again, and then I promptly forgot all about him until two days later when I reached in for my eyeliner. Luckily, by that time I was in the countryside, and so I set him loose on a nice garden veranda and tried not to think about how I had originally found him near a beach. I don't think I made a very good snail owner, is one moral of the story, and the other is that I am always going to be more careful when picking up shells from now on.