The Eventual Snail
Helix posterius
Natural history
The Eventual Snail travels at the standard speed of snails, which is to say that its punctuality is not a physical property but a temperamental one. What distinguishes Helix posterius is not that it is late — all snails are late — but that it is late to everything by exactly the interval required for the thing to be over. It arrives at the feast when the crumbs are being swept, at the flood when the ground is dry, at the argument when both parties have made up and are slightly embarrassed. The precision of this lateness has been measured and defies coincidence.
It should be understood that the Eventual Snail sets out promptly. It receives word of the blackberry windfall or the gathering of the garden or the once-a-century blooming, and it goes, at once, with its whole heart. The journey simply takes what it takes. Along the way the snail eats what it finds, rests where it is, and sees, at a pace of meters per day, absolutely everything — which is more than can be said for anyone who got to the party on time.
Older specimens develop a characteristic spiral to their shell that mathematicians have noted is slightly more open than the golden ratio, as though the curve had somewhere better to be and never quite closed on it. The snails themselves, when they finally arrive wherever it was, exhibit a behavior unique in the animal kingdom: they look around at the swept floor and the folded chairs, and they stay anyway, and by every measurable indicator, they enjoy it.
A fable
Word came to the garden that the century plant on the hill would bloom on midsummer’s night — one night only, a hundred years in the making. The whole garden set out. The rabbits arrived in the afternoon and got bored waiting. The foxes arrived at dusk and spent the bloom watching the rabbits. The moths arrived at the perfect moment and could not decide between the flower and the moon.
The Eventual Snail arrived nine days later.
The bloom was long over. The great stalk was bent, the petals browned and scattered down the hillside like a spent firework. The snail moved slowly among them. Here was the perfume, still rising faintly from the fallen petals, which the moths had been too excited to notice. Here was the seed pod, already forming, which no one else had stayed to see — the actual point, botanically speaking, of the whole century. Here was the quiet.
A rabbit, passing back the other way, stopped to gloat. “You missed it,” said the rabbit. “It was magnificent. You missed the entire thing.”
“I am sure it was,” said the snail, tasting a petal, which after nine days of sun had fermented very slightly and was better, frankly, than fresh. “How was the seed?” And the rabbit, who had not stayed for the seed, and did not know there was a seed, said nothing, and hurried off to be early for something else.
The event is for the punctual; the meaning keeps longer.
The moral of it