The Sea Snail Collector, by Anushmita Mohanty

Sarah Jackson -

Content warnings

Child abuse.

I stuffed pale diamond-shaped crackers into a newspaper cone, the pointy end of which featured the eye of the teacher who had commented that my dress was too tight, ten years ago when I was nine. He was in the papers for drinking and ramming his car into the front of a soda shop, after which hundreds of white catbubbles popped out of the soda machines, uncurling and flying away.

I’d gasped on seeing the news, before scurrying out to steal all my neighbors’ papers. I’d fashioned all the pages with his face into little paper planes and shot them out of the window.

I ate the crackers while I walked, one diamond per step, and then little bits of the newspaper, feeling them sticking to the roof of my mouth like they’d never come off. I imagined my mouth as a great palace theater, ceilings plastered with newspaper frescoes, my teeth a proscenium arch. I finally swallowed my teacher’s tiny face, trapping him in the dungeons forever. A hundred steps later, I was at the beach.

Too much woolgathering: the snails were already out and about, hunting children. I, of course, had known since I was an infant that snails wanted only one thing from life, which was to steal children’s bodies and trap their souls in shell husks, so I had stayed as far away from sea shells as possible. This wasn’t hard; as a child, I could easily fold into corners like an unfinished thought.

A snail sidled up to a child in a green dress, who was thumping her paws into the sand. Her father was walking along the shore, on his phone. Walk and talk. The snail pushed its shell against her—rather aggressively. She examined it, it was pretty. Not like some shells I’ve seen, though, just a basic pink-tinged spiral. I frowned, shaking my head, but she closed her fist around it.

What an idea.

She hiccupped and looked very confused, wriggling around in the sand, unfinished without the shell. Not her, but the snail, which she was now, and the snail was the girl in the green dress, who placed the shell on her back, and flicked her into the tide. The ocean was flecked with aquamarine and paler blues, little dashes of green, and small yellow shimmers of light were darting across the water.

“Well, that was nasty. All those years inside the swamp,” the snail-girl now belched at me.

“Don’t you like it better in the depths of the ocean?” I asked. “I think I would. I’d never come back if I was a snail. I’d just float around in the brine pretending to be a piece of onion pickling in the depths of prehistory.”

“Oh yes, it’s beautiful. It smells a bit fishy, though, and too many plastic bags floating around.”

“But what do you like here?”
“Money. And McDonalds. How long can you live without burgers? I’m off for a Filet-O-Fish,” and she pointed to the McDonalds that had mushroomed on the coastline. Snails are very hungry chaps, that’s what’s actually their undoing.

I knew it would be no good. I didn’t like the girl’s father’s back. His posture radiated smashing-plates anger. “Fuck off!” he screamed at the snail-girl. “You’re so damn ugly, like your mother. Get away from me!”

The snail-girl slunk back to me. “Now what do I do?” she said forlornly. “I picked a bad one.”

I sighed.

“Do you think,” I began. This was my elevator pitch. I knew there were eavesdropping gastropods everywhere. “Do you think,” I continued, “that I would be the most successful black market for snail-children, if you were capable of finding kids on your own? You think it’s easy. Just sniff out a child, oh look, they’re stupid, distracted by the pretty shell, let’s go steal them and chuck them into the ocean. Why, it’s a mess out here! Your fate is determined by the family unit you’re allotted”—one has to throw in some jargon—“and things are bad! There’s scarcely a child that isn’t being tormented or deprived or hit in school or by their family! The success rate is very, very bad. 12/100. 12%. And if you choose poorly…well, it’s all over, isn’t it? Good luck ever eating a burger again. It's not entirely your fault,” this was the client appeasement part, “you have to pick children since adults don't collect shells. But still…yeah.” I trailed off.

Snail-girl’s eyes went round. “Is… that so…” she said.

“And it’s not just that. You need me for PR, too. The rumors floating around! About snails eating children’s souls—”

“What rubbish!” Snail-girl cut in. “Why would I eat a soul, are all the burgers in the world gone?”

“That’s your personal problem,” I stated. Sand was getting between my teeth now.

“Do any of us even grow up to see adulthood?” Snail-girl enquired.

“Yeah, unfortunately, though you’ve got to get through the childhood bit first. Tinder is awash with you. Not everyone can tell, of course, but I can spot a snail a kilometer away, no matter how many playlists he links. It’s in the elbows.”

“Well. Do you ever date them?”
“No. Hook-ups only. They’re good, though. Got so much of the ocean in them. The other day I told this snail-man that my leg was cramping and he picked it up like a guitar and planted a hundred kisses and shed seventy-two tears over it.”

“Oh wow…how did that feel?”

“Nothing. It was my other leg that was cramping.” I sat down on the snail-girl’s sandcastle.

The sun was setting, and the fisher had cast his net in the sky, catching the night’s stars. The moon was still elusive.

A shell pushed my ankle. It was a deep blue, shot with streaks of purple, almost a perfect sphere. “Three hundred rupees,” I declared, assessing the scene. My talents weren’t really in the gastropod department. No, I could tell what a child was thinking even before the tide receded with her loot. That one, on the bench, claustrophobic in her hideous yellow dress, no one ever spoke to her. The one with her mother, her teacher wouldn’t answer her questions. Then the one by the taps…oh no, his father looked absent-minded, he probably misplaced his temper a lot.

I scanned the beach, as the graying crows circled over the sand. I spotted a father on the phone, with a boy—probably his son—who was excited about a crow, and jumped, splashing water on the man. Without missing a beat, the father struck him in the face and continued his conversation. The boy rubbed his reddened face and stared at the water. He took out his Milton water bottle from his bag, downing water in long swigs. I knew why he did that: it is easier to control tears scurrying down your face if you drink water, and I also knew that there’s nothing a violent father hates more than seeing signs of his own violence. The victim was tasked with cleaning the crime scene and did it commendably. No more tears.

I pushed the shell along the water. The dusty pink sunlight caught its broken edge, glinting. The child from the mat waddled over, swiping for it, crowing when he nabbed it from the slippery water. The snail-boy lurched, spitting out three translucent fish that looked like dumplings. Cosmic fishy dumplings. He went to his father.

“Here you go,” said the snail-boy, returning to me, handing me three hundred salty notes. “Said I have to buy chart paper for my school project. He loved that. Said I was a good boy for not crying.”

The tide rose as I sat down with my KFC and beer. Six chicken legs, not bad. The bones I tossed into the sea sprouted feathers and flew into the moon, looking for all the world like their antediluvian ancestors.

By the time the snail-girl sat next to me with a Filet-O-Fish, the beer had hit me.

“He gave me the burger as soon as his girlfriend came here. They’re walking hand-in-hand. She said it was cute how much my father loved me. Please tell me: how do I get out of this?” the snail-girl asked around bits of lettuce.

“You can’t,” I was feeling tipsy and contemplative. “There’s nothing you can do now. Keep your head down till you’re 18, I guess. Or run away and become a bougainvillea bush. That’s what everyone’s doing.”

She went away, presumably to enjoy her burger in peace. “Hey, that's so rude!” I called out. “I was giving you solid advice.”

Snail-girl was having none of it.

“Well, it's your own fault for choosing the Bay of Bengal!” I shrieked into the dark.

The sea parted, and the white-and-pink spiral knocked into me, a friendly shell-bump. “Yes, yes,” I muttered. My tipsiness had heightened. “You’re welcome—enjoy the sea. Your father gave the poor snail-girl a burger. You know, I didn’t think I would grow up to do this!” I explained, even though he hadn’t asked. Child-snails can be quite rude. “I wanted to be a beekeeper as a matter of fact, but my mother said double-crossing snails was the safest career option after engineering and medicine…certainly more than studying the arts…although I have the elbows of an artist…” But the shell floated away. I lurched upwards.

A cone poked me, buried into the sand beneath my foot. It was an inclined plane wrapped around a mango. It was beautiful, the prettiest shell I’d ever seen, and empty. I put it in my pocket and began the long walk home.

Anushmita Mohanty

Anushmita is from Ahmedabad, India, and is doing a PhD in English literature on pedagogy in higher education. She enjoyed reading and writing speculative fiction.