Memoir Of A Snail -2024- -

Then, at nineteen, I met Ken. Ken was a retired clown who smelled of musty wool and mothballs. He had a red foam nose he never wore—said it chafed. He drove a caravan shaped like a teardrop. He told terrible puns. “What do you call a snail on a ship? A snailor!” I laughed so hard I cried. That was the first time in years I’d done both at the same time.

We married in a registry office. He wore a polka-dot bow tie. I wore a snail brooch Gilbert had sent me. Ken and I moved into his caravan, parked on a vacant lot next to a fish-and-chips shop. We had no children. We had snails. Kenneth (the snail, not the husband) was our first. Ken the husband would read aloud to them from The Hobbit . “They’re listening,” he’d say. “Slowly.” Memoir of a Snail -2024-

Ken died on a Tuesday. Aneurysm. He was trying to fix a leak in the caravan roof during a heatwave. I found him face-down in a puddle of his own lemonade. The funeral was me, a priest who’d never met him, and the snails. I didn’t cry. I just tapped my ring. Then, at nineteen, I met Ken

When their father passes away unexpectedly, the fragile world of the Puddle twins collapses. The Australian social services system separates them without mercy. Gilbert is sent to a wheat farm in the blistering outback, forced to work for a brutal atheist farmer. Grace is sent to Canberra to live with a pair of swingers, a former couple who are more interested in exhibitionism than childcare. He drove a caravan shaped like a teardrop