Snails Soup.

‘How many did you get?’ she asked with that twisted smirk on her face, evidence that she knew she got more than me. It was sickening, how competitive she was. I wanted to punch her. I usually did. I put a hand behind my back and another up, showing all I had, but making her believe it was only half of the amount I actually had. Her smile rapidly vanished, she couldn’t stand it. ’Stop lying, show me the rest.’ She threw her body at me, and I got away from her with a simple movement to my left.

She fell to the ground and screamed. No one could hear her; we were as far as we could from the house. Or at least, as far as we were allowed. It’s where the old wooden cattle corridors are, those which were once used to get the biggest cows - ready to be killed - inside the big trucks which once came every week. I hadn’t seen one in months. I also hadn’t seen any cattle in months.

She suddenly stopped her fake crying and looked at me dead in the eye, with an exaggerated frown on her face and forcing her breathing as if that made her any more intimidating.

‘Show - me - the rest!’ she said with a voice trying to imitate that which our mom used when she was angry, taking a pause between each word. But this only made me laugh more.

She jumped on her feet, faster than I had ever seen her do so, and threw herself at me again. I tried to dodge, but my reaction was not fast enough. When she tackled me, the snails in my hand rolled out. She threw her body - despite being three years younger, she was much bigger than me - on top of mine, pinned my hands down underneath her rounded knees, and reached for the snails which were slowly coming out of the shelf in an attempt to escape. Too slow. Just like me.

Sister put them in her hands, probably crushing a few with her clumsiness, and into her pockets. Once she got the snails and her greediness was satisfied, I pushed her away from me and rapidly got back on my feet, walking in the direction of the house. She took a bit longer to follow. 

‘Wait!’ she screamed as I jumped over the corridor’s wooden gate. She was much less agile and athletic than me, and since that time she had fallen face down into the mud and I had laughed for days, she did not want to jump over the gate. Instead, she took her time to get the chain off with her clumsy fingers, pull up the rusty lock, open the gate, and follow the same steps in the opposite direction. I slowed my pace down so she would catch up, I did not want to give her the satisfaction of a full stop. I wouldn’t want to leave her behind. I only wanted to pick on her. I liked hearing her cry, it made me feel like things were normal. But I wouldn’t just leave her behind. She was all I had left.

It was cold, the coolest I had felt in years, and, despite there not being any snow, hardly anything was growing from the ground. We walked past Mom’s old garden, which once grew most of the vegetables we ate; tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, radish - which incapacity to grow was exceptional news for me since it always tasted like dirt - and sometimes beans and carrots. A few weeks before, I had tried growing a new plant of spinach, something called brussels sprouts, which we had never grown before, and sweet onions. The notebook Mom left for us indicated these were some of the few cold-hardy vegetables we could grow during a winter such as that.

The notebook, however, did not explain much of the how-to. So, a few weeks ago, I got on my old bike, which I had fixed all by myself, and rode to  town. I call it a town, but I am not sure if it really was one. The county’s police station, the smallest courthouse that probably exists, a grocery store chain that had more than the people in the entire county could ever need, and a gas station. That, was the town. It sure seemed like a city to me when all I knew was my house, the garden, the once-fulled farmyards, Mom, and my sister. So I left the bike by the entrance of the big - way too big - grocery store and walked in. Since Mom, I would go there once a month.

The thirty minutes I promised my sister it would take turned into an hour, and then two, and suddenly three when an old lady that could hardly walk - or talk - called for me from the end of the aisle.

‘Young lady,’ she screamed. But I did not hear. Or maybe I was just a bit scared. So I turned the opposite way, acting as if I was looking for my seeds in the cookie aisle although, now that I think, I actually was. She then moved slowly, very slowly, towards where I stood, and put a hand on my shoulder. I turned, and she saw in my eyes that I was hungry - starving really -terrified, and a little lost, but she also saw that I wasn’t one to be treated like a child, so she gave a step back, as if she was trying to help a lost puppy but was scared to get bitten. I had never bitten anyone, not anyone that I didn’t know at least. Only Sister’s arm, and it had been, believe it or not, an accident.

The old lady, after asking me from a distance if I was alone, if I was lost, and if my mother was there with me, and after I told her that I wasn’t alone, although I was, and that I wasn’t lost, although I was, and that my Mom wasn’t there because she was in bed at home, and after unfairly laughing at me for trying to find seeds in the cookie sections, pointed me in the direction of the seeds I had been searching for. I was quite shocked since I had already looked in that aisle. But she said to look in the higher shelves. Then she thought about it for a second and said she could lend me a hand, since I was probably too short, to which I replied I wasn’t too short and walked away.

When I got to the aisle, I realized I was, indeed, too short. But, to my surprise, the old lady appeared at the end of the aisle and slowly walked towards me. She picked the seeds I asked her to and added a few extra. She told me it was cabbage and broccoli, and that they would help me grow strong and healthy, and that I could put it in Mom’s soup if she was sick. I told her my Mom did not eat soup, but snails, because that was all my sister and I knew how to cook, so she, again, pointed me in the direction of the soups, where I found a shelf filled with infinite cans of different colors and flavors of soup. I put several of those in my bag and went to the place where you pay to take the stuff home. The old lady, who was right in front of me, took the bag from my hands, to which I did not complain because I assumed that was part of the system. She scanned them with her things, put them back in my bag, and told me I could go home.

‘I do not have to pay?’ I asked. ‘Not today,’ she said. It was like one of those movies Mom had shown me when she was healthy, and Sister and I had time to watch movies. I thought I was going to get back, and the garden was going to grow strong, stronger than ever, and the soup was going to bring Mom back, and years later I was going to run into this old lady and thank her and realize she was some kind of guardian angel protecting my family.

Now, walking through the garden, just a few weeks later, I realized how stupid that sounded. We were back to eating snails because the seeds I planted did not show any desire to grow in the freezing cold, and when I went back to the store, no one wanted to pay for all the soups I tried to buy. And when I sent my sister to see if she had better luck, she told me someone called ‘Sheriff’ threatened her with taking her to a cage, to which she responded she was no cattle and rode the bike back to the house.

After closing the wooden gate, she ran and reached my side. I could hear the clacking sound of the snails' shells in her pockets. When we were kids, we used to run by the creek and fill our pockets with tiny little rocks. We would sort them out at home, keeping the most precious of them all and sometimes create little necklaces for me, for Sister, and for Mom. Her pockets sounded like that. It made me want to play by the creek.

When we finally reached the house, we both took a moment to breathe. To this day, I’m not sure what it was. Maybe it was that we knew that Mom’s living but rotting body’s scent had taken over the house and that the threshold was our last breath of fresh air. Or we felt that the clacking of rocks in our pockets could now only be a memory, and the more time we spent on the other side of that door, the more days we were going to spend collecting snails instead. We did not like collecting snails.

I crossed the door first. The smell was so strong that my eyes teared. I took my shirt up to my nose. We spent as little time possible inside the house. We slept outside, by the barn. We ate outside, by the pool that was covered in algae and leaves. I filled up the pot with water, Sister turned the stove on, I put the stove on the fire, Sister washed the snails in the sink, I threw salt and pepper into the water, Sister tossed the living snails in the water not yet boiling. We covered it.

We both sat in silence at the kitchen table that was once covered with different types of garden-grown vegetables and our own meat. We watched the water steam leave the pot and let the smell of boiled snails cover our senses. It was my turn to feed Mom that afternoon. I exited the house and took one last breath of fresh, clean air. When I walked back inside, she handed me a plate of overcooked snails cut into tiny pieces so Mom could eat them. I sometimes thought it would be a good idea to clean the kitchen. 

I looked around the once-white walls and wondered if there was anything we could do to clean the grease and dirt off the walls, but I convinced myself that once Mom was okay, she would take care. We usually did that. We told ourselves 'When Mom is back' more often than not. That night, Mom barely opened her eyes to eat the overcooked snails. And she only ate two. She mumbled something which I could not comprehend.

"When Mom is back, I will ask her to teach me how to grow those plants so I can cook her healthy meals," I told myself.

My sister and I left the dirty dish on the sink; we would use it the next day when it was time for Mom’s next meal. We sat on the front porch and ate snails.

‘They do not taste the same as in the summer.’

‘They don’t,’ I said.

‘Maybe we should try looking somewhere else; maybe they will taste different.’

‘Maybe,’ I answered.

‘When Mom is back, I want her to show us where to find the best snails.’

‘When Mom is back, I don’t want to eat any more snails.’

‘Oh, me neither, you are right. I want meat.’ The thought of meat made my stomach growl. ‘Marie?’ I did not react. Hearing my name out loud felt like a dream. My sister always called me sister. Only Mom called me Marie. Or a friend, but I hadn’t seen any in a long time.

‘Yes.’

‘If Mom is not back, can we go?’

‘Where?’

‘Away. Sheriff could help us.’

‘But you said he wanted to put you in a cage like cattle.’

‘Yes, but maybe I was just scared,’ she said. ‘I think he was just trying to help us.’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay what?’ she asked, frustrated. It took me a minute to swallow the snail in my mouth.

‘Okay, if Mom doesn’t come back, we can go meet Sheriff.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Maybe he can give us some meat.’

‘Maybe he can,’ I said. And we both stayed in silence. There were no stars that night. It was cloudy. The sky was not black or blue but gray. Ash gray.

‘Marie,’ she said, interrupting the silence. It annoyed me that she wouldn't shut up. But the silence annoyed me much more. ‘Did you hear that clacking sound back on the farm? The sound of the snails bouncing inside my pockets? Didn’t it make you think of the creek? Of the rocks in our pockets?’

‘Yes, it did.’

‘I think we should do that. I think we should go play by the creek. Maybe tomorrow we could do that?’

‘Maybe we could,’ I said.