Good and pure until IT happened!!
I’d done my walk and had decided to do the dishes that had been building up in the sink, as dishes are often want to do. I filled the sink up with some pleasingly hot, soapy water and started washing the lot. Cups, plates, bowls, so far so good.
It didn’t take me very long to do them all and I was rather feeling a glow of satisfaction that always comes when you’ve finally done a chore you’re not too keen on.
So I reached into the bubbly, murky water for the plug to pull it out and send the soap off to water fate awaited down the black plumbing.
That’s when I felt it.
Oh god.
I can’t say what made my hand close around it. Maybe a naïve hope that it wasn’t what I was beginning to suspect it was? That last bit of hope that said, please let this be just a really big noodle, even as I knew there had been no noodly dishes served in the last 48 hours.
I brought my hand up slowly.
Please be a noodle! Please be a noodle!
It wasn’t a noodle.
It was fat and grey and looked like a delicious cooked mushroom. Why couldn’t it have been a delicious cooked mushroom?
It was, and even typing this makes me feel queasy….
It was a giant slug.
A giant, half boiled, dripping ooze, grey as a mushroom but not near as appealing, slug!
Now anyone who’s been to Durban knows that the bugs there are all mutants. Here in Joburg we have praying mantises and cockroaches. There they have PRAYING MANTIS’S AND COCKROACHES!! Huge beasts you could all but yoke up to a wagon! So this slug was no puppy. (The size of one yes, but the urge to stroke it didn’t come upon me curiously!).
I just stood there with this thing in my sweet, unprotected, precious hand! (All these descriptive words just suddenly bubbled out of my consciousness as I stood there.)
On the outside I appeared very cool, calm and collected.
On the inside it was more along the lines of, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…..”
I walked to the door with it still slobbering in my hand,
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE…..”
Opened the door, went to the flower bed,
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE….”
Then hurled the gelatinous body as hard as I could into the pansies!!!
Then turned and gracefully went inside, closed the door and then, from my mouth, “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHH WAAAAAAAAH!!!! NOOOOOOOOO!!!!”
And various other sounds of a creature in mental distress!
I was just so GROSS!!!! And I like bugs, I find them fascinating. Just a slug? Drowned in my dishes!! That was just an uncool little trick to play on me!
And then my eyes roved to the dishes. Oh the dishes!!! I’d just cleaned them! They looked all sparkly and new and wholesome. But what a terrible secret they now possessed! Slug slimed, each and every one of them! I’d have to wash them all, all over again!
I got shakily to my feet (Hadn’t noticed Id slid to the floor) and made my uneasy way back to the dishes. First thing I did was nuke the sink with water hotter then the lavas of hell.
Then, checking it in a manor more thorough then Sherlock Holmes could ever manage, I skittishly put the plug in and proceeded to painfully wash each dish over again.
But I was scarred. That Slug had looked like a cooked mushroom. That same grey colour, gosh that same consistency! I loved cooked mushrooms.
It took me over a year before I could eat another one again without expecting it to wiggle between my teeth!
I still get the heebie-jeebies around slugs to this day. I always feel like they’re plotting something. Why don’t they have shells like nice, slow moving, never-found-in-your-sink, snails? Did they sell them t support a drug habit or something? Sly horrors.
But isn’t it funny how an incident so small and unassuming can haunt you years to come? The human creature is a strange one indeed! (Still I like them better then slugs because I’ve never found one floating in my wash goods!)
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