To the banana slug I killed last fourth of July:

Juliet Smith

For what little it’s worth, I never meant to hurt you. The sudden firecracker at my feet overwrote me for a moment, and it was adrenaline that moved me. I couldn’t even see you, behind me in the dark and so very, very small. Still, though, it was my leg that jumped back, my heel that ground your body into the concrete, my skin that coated itself in your innards. I take full responsibility for your death.

I know it’s ridiculous, to some. My friends never fail to roll their eyes, and I understand why they think this is an overreaction. You’re only a slug, and I would never have hurt you intentionally, so why should I feel bad? My grandmother, who I love, uses salt on any slug she sees near her garden, and I used to crouch down beside her to watch them dissolve in torturous spasms. My dog, who I love, eats them alive, impaling them on massive canines as my sisters squeal in disgust at the slime dripping from his maw. I know violence. You are not even the first creature I have murdered, nor can I guarantee you will be the last.

Like your day-old carcass to the ground, however, I am stuck on you. I came back the next day, you see, hoping that maybe I only hurt you some and that you would have dragged yourself away to some wet dark place to nurse your wounds. I saw you in sunlight. I saw you in sunlight and realized that I could have brushed it off the night before, dismissed the shock and horror of what I’d wrought as disgust for the texture coating my sole. I could have left and never looked back, and I would probably not even remember you now. I could have gotten away with it, but instead I returned to the scene of the crime. A guilty conscience– isn’t that what gets us all, in the end?

You probably had a family, of the mollusk kind. Maybe you were looking forward to a particularly luscious dandelion leaf you’d spotted earlier in the evening, that you now will never taste. I have always admired the glisten of early morning light on the dew-mixed slimy coating of a banana slug, and I wonder if you once enjoyed the silky warmth of it as well. I wouldn’t know: your body was dry and hard and shattered when I bore witness to it. The moment of our meeting was marked only by the texture of your viscera as it exploded between me and the unforgiving earth. 

I suppose that’s the part that has you haunting me: the full extent of your impact on me is derived from my impact on you. Your memory shrinks me into some small thing, cowering under the massive boot of my own capacity for harm. The weight of my strength makes me wish I were frailer. There’s the crux, my dear and dead banana slug: between the two of us, only one is truly spineless.