Slug Bait

Olivia sat in peaceful silence in her new studio overlooking the garden. Finally the last of the painters had left; their work complete. Gone were the weeks of agony suffering through a constant mist of drywall dust that daily like a precipitate coated everything in a thin residue. The renovations were over; the home now a decorator's dream, well, at least a dream come true for Olivia. She and Peter, her husband for five years, had acquired the Bartlett place two months earlier and as part of the decision to buy, Peter had promised to comply with all of her requests to renovate and upgrade the property to modern standards while still keeping the historical character of the century-old home. So for the first two months of spring Olivia had focused her energies on contractors, sub-contractors, and tradesmen who were omnipresent and always underfoot as they worked on the refurbishing of the interior. They crowded into her space, encroached on her privacy, invaded the tiny corners of her world until she felt she could no longer stand the intrusion. But finally thankfully they were gone , leaving her with a polished jewel of a home restored to its former splendour.

She now sat with her cup of Earl Gray and turned her thoughts toward controlling the wide expanse of garden that stretched out in a rambling tangle of greenery below the studio's wall of glass that drew nature into her smooth white sanctuary. Over the renovation time the garden had moved to its own rhythms. The lawn grew high and bent itself over in thick unruly clumps; the rhubarb sprayed its broad leaves across the garden bed and choked out the other plants yet to be discovered. Raspberries, ferns, grape vines, and an assortment of rapidly growing bushes grew together into a convoluted web that actually barricaded the pathway leading to the back tool shed.

As the spring days grew longer creeping toward the beginning of summer, Olivia ventured out into the garden, which for her was an untamed jungle nightmare in need of subjugation. The huge cedars ringing the property cast long shadows across the lawn except at midday when the central clump of old towering pear trees left too long away from pruning provided a canopy against the sunlight. Shaded plants proliferated; ferns, Jack-in-the-pulpit, hostas, columbine and crested irises, in a tight competitive profusion amid the tangled beds. A stone pathway with openings onto the lawn and the shade of the pear trees led from the back sun deck to the tool shed long cloaked in grape vines twisted together with rampant raspberry bushes whose long stems twined and mingled with the new green shoots of the vine.

The great difficulty for Olivia was where to start since the scope of the project was certainly much broader than the tiny flower boxes that she had tended on the balcony of their apartment in the city. For her now the garden was the wilderness, the fringes of civilization, the outer reaches of the unknown. The dark earth with its black rotting pear leaves was alien and not as familiar as the vermiculite, the dried sphagnum moss and packaged potting soil she'd purchased in the past from the gardening centre. Things moved and twitched, slithered and smeared their bodily fluids across the ground in her garden.

Despite her fears Olivia ventured out into the jungle. She came prepared in her denim dungarees, with kneeing pads strapped with Velcro, sturdy leather work gloves to keep the black earth away from her nails and the soft skin of her hands, and a straw hat with a wide brim to protect her from the sun's rays blasting through the reported holes in the ozone layer. She was ready for anything and determined to place some semblance of order on the tangled mess.

She started with the pathway, clearing it to the tool shed by yanking and tugging out the overgrown foliage. She then with a tenacity of someone possessed with destruction, pruned and clipped back the raspberry bushes, and the grape vines covering the tool shed and snipped the ends of the lateral branches of the cedars and the lower branches of the pear trees. She felt the intensity of her desire for control as she progressed , driven onward with each clip of the shears like a gambler caught up in placing just one more bet on a game of chance. For her this was the easy part; the shaping, the molding of the vegetation patterns. It was all so clear since she in a sense was removed from it by the extension of the pruning shears, the cutting action of the lethal blade.

Each night as they sat at the dinner table looking out onto the garden pathway, she reflected on her progress to Peter.

" What do you think? she'd ask.

Peter not being too interested, his mind caught up in the daily jogging motion of his job would make the same thinly veiled reply.

" It's shaping up. Nice to see some order emerging out of all your effort."

Each day Peter went off to work commuting an hour to the city, jogging to the office, racing through the labyrinth of the corporate caverns of steel, glass and plastic. Sometimes he would be gone for days on end, flying out to distant cities to network with other joggers, pounding along the tiled corridors of similarly designed structures, neat tidy byways of future growth and development.

Olivia ran the home and tamed the garden. Slowly as the garden began to come under thumb, she came closer to the soil, getting down into it, beneath the carpet of leaves, down to the roots, the black earth teeming with its own cosmology of creeping, crawling and sliding creatures, creatures alien and offensive to Olivia's pure and immaculate sensibilities. But she was determined to beautify her property, make the outside of her home as pleasing as the inside. The shaded plants proliferated in their dark corners and she added bright colourful perennials and annuals in order to create a canopy of delight for her eyes to feast on in the long summer days that were just ahead. She dug and planted and made room for all of her new acquisitions with the same intensity and zeal that she demonstrated in her initial attempts to tame the tangled overgrowth that presented itself to her in the early spring.

She worked mornings and afternoons, perspiring beneath her dungarees as the early summer sun brought the plants into bloom. She blended huge batches of potting soil, soaked peat moss, vermiculite and bone meal in her wheelbarrow and spread the rich organic mixture around her beloved plants. She talked to them and encouraged them with kindness and love, confident in her growing love of her garden.

But as she worked the sun-drenched days, forces were toiling in the darkness to destroy her efforts. Gradually she noticed wilting stems, devoured new shoots, leaves with tiny round perforations. In the early morning she saw the mucous-like secretions glinting in thin trails across the soil below the lower leaves. Day by day the holes chewed from the leaves became larger and larger, the garden became shabbier and Olivia became angrier and angrier.

However Olivia was not a defeatist; she was determined, even tenacious, as tenacious as she had been to initially convince Peter to part with their money for the interior renovations, as tenacious as she had been with the sub-contracted workers who seemed bent on prolonging their work into months of labour that she felt could have been accomplished by only weeks of concerted effort. For Olivia she was about to enter into battle with the unwashed forces of nature. She was going into war.

Olivia's first strategy was to look through her Time Life gardening books on pests. The books were by and large pristine, "uncracked" and in the city had served as decoration on the book shelf along with the innumerable coffee table books she exchanged from time to time from shelf to table whenever new guests came for dinner. She focused on slugs and snails, the culprits who had left their slimy silver trails across the dark rich soil she'd laboured to create. Olivia read about toads and box-turtles being natural predators but she couldn't stand toads with their knobby skin, their wrinkles and warts and the fact that they blended into the environment. She'd never know when she'd come across one while digging up weeds and she couldn't tolerate that uncertainty. As for box-turtles they were so foreign she couldn't contemplate the idea. But slug saloons and the collection of the slugs in containers of hot salted water appealed to her although it all seemed rather messy. These were actions over which she felt she could have control.

The first early morning raid caught the enemy by surprise. Olivia armed with her plastic container of boiling salted water moved in on the under leaves of her plants. Beneath the hostas she had the greatest success plucking the tiny slippery bodies between her fingers and dropping them to their death. At first the touch revolted her; their slime like semen on her fingers disgusted her, but as she saw the trophies of her war accumulate she became numbed to the sensation. The snails were easier since she could find their brightly striped shells and she didn't need to feel the slime or to brush them from the ends of her fingers into the boiling water.

Over time she experimented as each morning brought new waves of attack on the forces of evil. When she plucked the snails from the leaves often they were hidden deep within their shells. As a child while on a nature hike she'd watched a camp counselor pick up a snail that had inhabited a niche in the tidal zone on the Pacific coast, watched and listened as she hummed at the creature. Miraculously the snail had responded to the notes and had ventured out of the safety of its shell. Olivia tried out the experiment, humming a low tone siren at first, dropping the pitch until the tiny head appeared, extending its horns waving and rolling its body like the stem of a plant in gently flowing wind. As the snail extended out to its full length, long and stiff, searching for the source of the siren sound, Olivia plunged its body to its boiling watery death.

However her manual combat wasn't enough. The forces against her were too numerous. As fast as she could pluck them and plunge them into the boiling water and then pour the soup of destroyed bodies down the toilet, they multiplied and continued their voracious habits. The slug saloons became phase two; small round green trays with lids filled with foul-smelling liquid, like the stale residue left in the bottom of Peter's beer empties. They sat in the garden in strategic locations for three days upon which Olivia would harvest their contents, a slimy putrescence, a blend of fermented liquid and the limp floating bodies of her victims. The process was abhorrent, as she delicately balanced each saloon in her palm, carefully treading along the pathway, up the steps of the verandah into the house toward the toilet, for the final execution. The washing and refilling of the saloons made her gag and almost retch each time she harvested her catch.

The irony remained however since the more victims she harvested, the more smaller slugs appeared, the greater the decimation occurred on the leaves of her plants. She even felt that both the slugs and nails were generally becoming larger, more ugly and more menacing.

Peter always worked late, commuting back from the city long after dark, eating his big meal at lunch in the company cafeteria. Olivia didn't mind being used to it even when they had lived in the city. Occasionally he would be gone for weeks at a time on a trade show circuit. One was coming up in the next week and Olivia waited to finish the slug war once and for all before he left. The hand to hand combat wasn't working; the slug saloons seemed to be just tiny traps for the stupid ones. She needed something more drastic, a final solution to rid her garden of these disquieting predators. She felt she couldn't enjoy the garden anymore. They were out there in the darkness watching her as she strolled along the path, as she ate her lunch on the verandah, as she lay out on the sun deck in her shorts and bikini top. She felt vulnerable even though the rational part of her knew her fears were nonsense.

Nevertheless she decided to ask Peter if he knew of an ultimate poison, a substance that would eradicate them. Peter didn't know of any substance that was specific to slugs and snails. Many poisons would kill them but would also destroy other life forms and their original toxicity would remain in the soil for decades. She didn't want that since deep in her heart she felt she was an environmentalist. Peter suggested a visit to the local hardware store.

"You know, these country places stock everything, even household remedies and strange pioneer potions that might work."

Fired with determination Olivia took the Toyota Land Cruiser into town and went straight to the only hardware store, containing a menagerie of diverse household items, building supplies and farming tools. She didn't browse but wandered around the aisles waiting for the shopkeeper, a tiny pasty-faced man with an elongated neck to be free from a number of customers who were asking questions and paying for their goods.

When the store was finally vacant except for her and the shopkeeper, she approached the counter.

" This may seem like a strange request, but do you have anything that will kill snails and slugs and not harm the garden?"

The gray and mottled face of the shopkeeper broke slowly into a grin that slid smoothly across his features. He seemed to slither sideways behind the counter as he turned and reached behind him for a small bronze key hanging from a bent construction nail.

"No damage to the garden, eh, I'll be a minute."

He disappeared around the corner and down a short flight of stairs leading to the basement. Olivia glanced around at huge tubs of nails beside the weigh scales, dangling enameled pots for boiling preserves, kettles and frying pans, and cast-iron skillets. But within seconds her inquiry was interrupted by the shopkeeper's sudden and almost imperceptible re-appearance. He was carrying an oddly-shaped package tied with a crisscross of bleached white string.

" This will have a definite effect, mam, but use it sparingly and keep the package stored securely."

" What should I do? "

" You're not from these parts are ya. "

" No, my husband and I just moved into the Bartlett place a few months ago. We've been city people most of our lives."

" Thought so. Most folks around here don't have much trouble with snails. " He let the last word trail out like the body of the word moving across the surface of his face.

" Do ya have em in the house yet? "

" No, for heaven's sakes, they're bad enough just out in the garden."

" Thought I'd ask cause by the time the garden gets over run, there are usually signs that they're into the house somehow. Anyway you want to know how to use this stuff. This is special; it's serious. This ain't no poison but it works. Just spread a little on the soil underneath the leaves of the plants that are being eaten. The bigger slugs and snails eat it and there appetite increases so much they start to cannibalize the smaller ones. Before you know it you've only got one big one left. It's so ingenious, so ecologically sound." He giggled with pleasure in describing the process.

Olivia paid the shopkeeper thirty-dollars, thinking it was somewhat expensive and walked out with a five pound bundle of powder wrapped in its plain-brown wrapper without any brand name marking or advertising. It all seemed strange to her; the shopkeeper seemed strange, slippery and dishonest but she was desperate and had run out of solutions. It had to work she thought, these country folk have always had natural remedies that city folk had long forgotten about or had never known.

At dinner Peter seemed pleased that Olivia had the answer and he was willing to help her spread the powder throughout the garden. Before dark with their meal completed he unwrapped the bundle at one end. He reached in with his hand cupped and drew out a fine white powder that resembled bone-meal. He set the package on the path and they both took handfuls of the powder and spread it on the soil beneath the leaves. Peter was exuberant and liberally spread the powder in thick layers.

" Peter, just use it sparingly; that's what the shopkeeper said. Too much may be overkill or it might cancel out the effect. "

" Well Olivia, what's done is done; you should've told me before I started. Anyway this stuff is probably like everything else, diluted so you have to keep coming back time and a again for more. Have we covered everything? "

" I think so. Now, Peter, we have to store this stuff in a secure place. "

" I'll put it in the shed, up off the ground and in a dry spot. "

That evening as they were both nestled down in the darkness of their bedroom, Olivia's mind was full of foreboding images. She felt that she should be content that the answer to all her difficulties with the slugs had been laid out for her, so to speak, upon the soil of the garden. But there was an eerie dis-ease within her heart. Images of slugs in a frenzy eating each other rolled her stomach into knots as she lay on her back staring up at the ceiling. She could even hear them crunching and slithering. With greater concentration she listened and started to hear their sounds within the walls behind the recently painted drywall. She knew in her rational brain that this was only paranoia. Peter, beside her slept amid his muffled groans and snorts and she felt frightened and alone.

In the morning over breakfast Olivia didn't mention her fears as Peter talked incessantly about his up-coming business trip to Washington. On and on he went, completely self-absorbed by his own agenda, not picking up on Olivia's anguish and frailty. Finally he broke from his monologue and turned his thoughts toward the garden.

" Let's see if your secret remedy has worked, shall we, Olivia. "

Olivia disguised her fear and responded with a cheerful, " All right, let's see. "

In one night the garden had changed. The leaves seemed fuller, more vibrant and healthy. Beneath the plants the powder had been consumed and replaced by silver threads of mucus that caught the sun's rays and projected tiny sterling strings of beads amid the damp earth and the cool shadows. Olivia remained respectfully silent in awe of the transformation and fearful of the unknown. Peter was exuberant. He went to the shed and got the bag of powder and proceeded to spread new layers throughout the garden.

" This will do it. This will get them all. "

He spread heaping layers over the soil beneath the plants. Olivia stood speechless remembering what the shopkeeper had said about using it sparingly.

Each morning they surveyed the garden. Each morning the garden grew more lush, the powder had been consumed and the trails of mucus were left beneath the leaves of the plants.

Each night the horrors of Olivia's paranoia grew more vivid, the sounds more intense, her terror more consuming of her soul.

In the darkness she lay silently listening, night after night, sweat beading on her skin and welling in the pores. She heard the chewing sounds, intensified as if amplified by the hollowness of the room. Roots of plants came crashing toward her and she imagined the tiny slugs working their way through the chalky dust of the drywall, poking discrete holes just below the baseboard, concealed in tiny burrows waiting to emerge in unison when she was asleep and alone. Peter would be going to Washington soon and she knew that she couldn't cope if these images continued to plague her mind. In fact it was tomorrow that he would be going, rising early, kissing her goodbye as she still lingered in pre-dawn slumber. She cuddled close to his back and smelled his skin scent, feeling more secure and finally fighting back the nightmares fell asleep.

The bright sun shone through the skylight, shouting at her to get up. It was late and the other side of the queen-sized bed was cold and the covers open. Peter had already gone. She couldn't remember his parting kiss. Maybe he was downstairs rustling up breakfast for them before he finally went on his business trip. Wishful thinking she supposed as she descended the stairs, entered the kitchen to find the decimated rind of a half grapefruit, the discarded wrapper of a whole-wheat bran-muffin and the dregs of a cup of black coffee. He surely was gone. On looking out the window, though, she was surprised to see the car still parked in the driveway. Must have taken a cab or arranged a ride in somehow. Unlike him though not to park and fly, she thought.

After breakfast Olivia took her coffee out onto the deck to survey her garden, her tamed orderly garden that was flourishing. The white powder had certainly cured the slug problem. She would no longer find the limp leaves and stems wilting as their roots were set upon by small and large slugs alike. The white powder was gone and in its place was a network of wide intersecting slimy trails though the garden.

The day passed with Olivia sipping tea, bundled up and shaded against the sun's rays, beneath the patio table umbrella and reading and enjoying the pleasures of a garden now tamed and under control.

That evening, however she set about to spread the white powder. She entered the shed and went immediately to the shelf where Peter stored the brown paper bag. The shelf was empty and below it on the floor was the bag's empty shell laying there on the dirt-crusted boards like the dried skin of and animal long deceased. The powder was all gone, consumed. Perhaps, she thought, Peter had used it all last time and had left the empty bag on the floor of the shed. She wondered for a while staring at the shelves and the four walls of the shed, smelling the damp mustiness of the earth, the fertilizers, the organic matter smell of growth and decay together. Fear crept into her heart, lingered there and planted strange thought. She felt a presence in the walls, beneath the floor as she stood waiting. She knew the insanity of her thoughts, knew they were only paranoid delusions of a female left alone while her husband went off on business. The shopkeeper's face loomed at her through the dusty air, as did huge slugs swelling and subsiding, breathing as they too waited silently in the damp earth somewhere in the shadows. The shadows grew longer, more apparent and Olivia left the shed slamming the door shut and pulling the latch across. She rushed down the path, up onto the deck, closed and locked the French doors behind her.

The night lay before her as she waited for Peter to call from Washington; he always did once he arrived at his hotel while on a business trip. Once in a while he would forget and she would have to leave a message for him on the hotel voice mail. This time though she had to wait for him as he hadn't left the hotel name or the number as he usually did.

That night there was no call and Olivia sat patiently waiting, hearing all the sounds except the one she wanted to hear. At midnight she slipped on her flannelette nightgown, mixed up a warm glass of milk with honey, a drink designed to make her sleep, and proceeded upstairs to the sky lit bedroom. The sky told her it would be a cool night with the stars peeping in at her from a black background.

The darkness was damp and the walls seemed to pulsate around her as she slept, half in that dreaming state floating into total unconsciousness. She heard the first movements as if amplified crunches of a million tiny mouths were sucking and chewing their way through the drywall and up through the mattress of the bed. At first within the dreamscape she sensed these motions but then she was conscious lying on her back bathed in the juices of her own perspiration, listening to the sounds building within the room, within the chamber of her soul. It was then she felt the soft cool sensation slide across her ankle. Involuntarily she jerked her foot back, electric with the shock of the image sliding into her brain. But her foot did not move, couldn't move and the soft cool sensation spread across her skin, moved slowly and deliberately across her narrow calf and the inside of her knee. Olivia jerked sharply but nothing moved. The feelings spread up between her parted thighs and nestled themselves into the soft moist folds of her vagina. Her breathing stopped, held voluntarily, as the sensations of her sex being manipulated so delicately, so smoothly and unabrasively took hold of her body and her mind. She felt the unwanted violation, the unnatural darkness that was occurring in the bedroom, but her body released itself to its erotic pleasure. She clutched the cuffs of her nightgown tightly, quickening her breathing in rapid bursts toward a climax. And when after prolonged sensation she finally arched her back and screamed out her tormented pleasure she was released into the damp sweat-soaked sheets to cry tears of loss and loneliness.

In the rational compartment of her brain, the part that renovated houses and tamed wild gardens, she lay in bed in the early morning feeling shame, wishing Peter were back to hold her and to drive away the sexual fantasy she believed she'd had the night before. But deep in that unconscious compartment she felt used and abused, victimized yet fatally attracted to a grooming process that had crept into her.

The day progressed as usual, however she didn't venture outside even though the sun bathed the garden and brought out the myriad of colours. She could hear the sounds out there; she could sense the presence of something more powerful than she felt she could ever cope. So she remained all day waiting for Peter's phone call, sipping Earl Gray and puttering about the house aimlessly. At times she'd get the urge to enter the garden as if some siren were beckoning her, but she resisted.

Peter didn't call and Olivia went to bed alone to stare up at the canopy of stars once again. But this night was different for she was determined not to sleep, determined to await the intruder, to prove that it didn't exist except within her mind or to kill it with the serrated blade she brought with her from the kitchen. Sanity was being tested here she felt and she was going to be the victor.

Minutes passed into hours of waiting in silence listening only to her own extended breathing, breathing that became her focal point, the cool air in though her nostrils, the warm air out past the nasal hair. Olivia became lost within her own breathing, within its rhythmical ebb and flow so much that the moment she waited for was upon her. Soft cool mollusk flesh meeting the openings and the pores of her body in every place, sucking at her, pulling at her , ravaging her, arousing her. She lay enveloped with their hugeness, wallowing powerlessly in the sexual sensation, rising her above climax, preventing her satisfaction and driving her into a frenzy of distraction.

As suddenly as it began, the sensation stopped and she was left with the yin-yang of her own breathing, alone and unsatisfied. She had heard the sirens and they were calling out into the garden. She rose from the bed naked beneath the stars; her long thin legs pale as silver, the arch of her back smooth and gleaming with her perspiration, her small breasts like tiny oranges in a still-life.

There was no time for rational thought as she opened the French doors, crossed the sun deck in the moonlight now visible through the trees. She clutched the knife involuntarily as an extension of herself and ran toward the dark earth beside the tool shed. The sirens called to her as if she too were a curious creature emerging from a shell to the low attractive humming sounds that brought snails out fully extended from their protective homes. She couldn't stop herself as her bare feet moved among the dewy vegetation and the damp black soil. Once near the tool shed where Peter had piled up the grass clippings and last year's leaves she involuntarily sunk to the earth and lay prostrate letting her body depress the moist soil into one reciprocal shape to hers. The sirens had stopped, leaving the cricket sounds and the drip, drip, dripping of the dew to blend with the smooth sliding sound that approached her.

Until now her enraptured sensations had only been felt, but moving toward her she could see the glistening body of a five foot snail wide in girth. Again she was paralyzed and waited for the joining as the huge snail foot widened and slid over her covering her torso from neck to the mound of her sex. Her ecstasy began as she flailed her arms back and forth like wings, arms making angels in the damp earth, disturbing the rotting pile of grass clippings and leaves. She climaxed and screamed at the top of her lungs, still pinned to the ground by the weight of the animal and as she looked sideways she saw exposed the stiff clawed hand of her husband along with his torso and bare buttock eaten away and ravaged by slugs and snails and other tiny creatures with little legs that scampered over the blue-yellow skin. Her second scream was now higher pitched and full of inner anguish; a dry scream that had no voice left in it. One hand moved and she raised the arm connected to it, lifting its clenched fist high over her head and plunging the kitchen blade down onto the soft skin of the horrendous slug and deep down into her own heart.

David Fraser likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not formally working as an educator, he is either writing and researching or involved in one of the following sports: alpine skiing, ski teaching as a full time professional ski instructor at Mt. Washington, BC http://www.mtwashington.bc.ca/winter/default.cfm , windsurfing, tennis, golf, cycling, hiking. In addition he likes to garden, listen to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has built his second water garden which has become his new daily sanctuary. His is learning and refining his Spanish fluency and will travel back to Central and South America in the near future. He lives among the flora and fauna of the British Columbia West Coast. David is the editor of Ascent Magazine - Aspirations for Artists (established 1997).

Email: David Fraser

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