Author: Emma Atkins

There was a snail on the wall: a little circle of brown marring the white cladding, innocuous enough that security hadn’t removed it and repainted the entire block. Inside, they were making the future, showing it off like Sammie had his science-project volcano, grinning with pride as he’d wheeled it in. His first attempt had erupted inside itself and collapsed into a pile of soggy papier-mâché.

“Look, Auntie Gracie, look!”

Sammie had clapped his hands excitedly as the implosion had caused liquid to leak through the cardboard base of Vesuvius, spreading across the table and dripping down to pool on the linoleum floor. It took two other projects as its Pompeii. Sammie’s next volcano had been a work of art – all’s fair in the name of progress. This volcano was the machine, and rather than bubbling up red-dyed sodium, it was supposed to solve our greatest problems and win first prize in stopping the end of the world.

I’d come outside for a cigarette, hiding around the back to avoid the main cameras. Jim in security would overlook it if he spotted me on one of the back-entrance monitors, just as innocuous as a brown snail on a white wall. The guys on the front desk weren’t nearly so understanding. I’d like to put them in my shoes, have them make small talk in that stuffy box of bespectacled idiots for longer than an hour and see how desperate they got for a smoke. Or something stronger. I could do with something stronger.

‘You always have to be drunk’ Charles Baudelaire had gotten that right. Only he’d followed it up with some philosophical drivel about being drunk on wine, poetry or virtue rather than the whisky I was craving as I smoked and observed the snail. They say the machine knows poetry, that it can recite you Shakespeare’s homoerotic epics or Lovecraft’s nightmare fuel just as easily as calculate which Pompeii should burn in the name of progress, which massacres to justify or condemn and which snails to cull or let live on white walls.

I pluck the snail from the wall, holding it carefully between finger and thumb to get a better look at this little world. Cornu aspersum – the ‘common garden snail’ – a relic from back when people still had gardens, before the world became steel and plastic. There was a bite to the wind this late in the year, a cold edge to everything. From the white film over the mouth of its shell, I assumed the snail was hibernating; sleeping peacefully while the men inside debated whether or not it would wake again come Spring.

Sammie had picked one up once. He’d run off into the woods and come back with it held carefully between finger and thumb.

“What is it, Auntie Gracie?”

He’d squealed in delight as the grey body unfurled, like molten rock from a volcano, spilling out over his chubby hand. I stubbed out my cigarette on the wall, creating a little circle of black where the snail had been. I had to go back inside. I held the snail up to the camera, knowing that Jim was watching when the lens blinked in confusion, then put it in my pocket and went to help burn Pompeii for the second time – all in the name of progress.