Memoir Of A - Snail -2024-

I searched through my shoeboxes for three days. On the fourth day, I found it: a tiny lockbox I’d forgotten. Inside was a photograph I’d stolen from Phyliss’s house years ago. It was a picture of my mother, pregnant with us. She was smiling. She had a snail on her shoulder. On the back, in her handwriting: “Two hearts. One muscle. Slow and steady.”

“Hello, Sylvia. Tell me something slow.” Stop-motion animation of a single snail crossing a piano keyboard. Each key it touches plays a sad, sweet note. Then a second snail joins it. Then a third. They move in a spiral. The final frame: a hand reaching down, palm open. The snails climb aboard. Fade to black. Memoir of a Snail -2024-

Memoir of a Snail Logline: A melancholic, rhythmically tapping woman named Grace Pudel looks back on a life of hoarding, loss, and twinless twinship, discovering that a soft, slow existence is not a weakness but a strange, beautiful form of survival. Part One: The Spiral Begins My name is Grace. Grace Pudel. I live inside a spiral. Not a literal one—though my house is a caravan that my late husband, a retired clown, spun into a donut shape before he died. No, I mean a real spiral. A snail’s shell of memory. I tap my wedding ring— tap, tap, tap —on the glass of my terrarium. Three snails inside: Sylvia, Peggy, and the late, great Kenneth. They don’t mind the tapping. They’re good listeners. I searched through my shoeboxes for three days

After that, I stopped leaving the caravan. I grew a small garden of moss on the windowsill. I stopped showering. I wrote letters to Gilbert I never mailed. The shoeboxes multiplied—under the bed, in the oven, inside the toilet tank. I became a snail: soft, shelled, withdrawing at the slightest touch. It was a picture of my mother, pregnant with us