48: Life and Death

My wife and I go out after dark into the wet garden after the rains shine our flashlights among the flowers look for trails of slime for brown snails hanging above the brown earth slugs sticking to the fine leaves. They live at a rate below our comprehension of movement; they die quickly under the foot smeared along the path. We pick them off one by one. Each snail makes a small crunch, a squeak. The slugs die silently, but leave a slime on the fingers hard to wash off.