Slug Lovers

Outside in the yard, the last outing before bed. The dog lingered on the leash, done with his business but not ready to go back inside. The early evening rain, now done, left a cool dampness behind. The woman stood in the grass near the porch, holding the leash in one hand and a flashlight in the other, bored. The light caught a glistening from the terra cotta planter, full of dead geraniums and fallen leaves. The woman bent to see what it was.

Suspended from a foot-long rope of sparkling slime oozing over the top edge of the planter were a pair of leopard slugs (Limax maximus), entwined and entwining, in coitus. They moved in a delicate arabesque, a slug Cirque du Soleil. Below their lover’s knot, an iridescent globular mass undulated slowly, pulsing like a jellyfish. The mass changed shape as the slugs twirled. The woman watched, mesmerized. After a time, the gelatinous blob morphed into an inverted umbrella, then a two-headed cane, then two headless pipes, separating and retreating into the bodies of the lovers. Coitus interruptus.

The leopard slugs unwound themselves from one another and climbed up the dangling slime rope. At the top, one following the other, they bellied over the lip of the planter, into the night forest of flower pot detritus. The woman, knocked alert by nature’s display, returned the dog inside to a slumbering house.