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"But Jean-Luc, we'll be late." Her voice hesitated as it rose. While I sat, it wandered, dripped out of her mouth and into the valleys of the shower curtain, under the crack in the door and over—trailing around what must have seemed like acres of beige shag carpeting—to me.

I'd been struggling with a necktie. "Simone," I said, "You're going to have to speak up if you want me to understand you." Simone always talked in the shower, mostly to herself, and I got the feeling that she puzzled over her sounds as much as I did. Slow sounds, deliberate ones, the sort that curled around the ear and stuck, in a not altogether unpleasant way.

"Simone?" I knew what she'd said. I, an English-speaking man with a French-speaker's name, the hyphenated type of person who should be calling her "see-MUHN." I wanted to hear her chide me again. I suppose that's perverse.

"I said I love you." She was out of the shower now, tossing her wet verbosity at me through the steam. It smelled like lavender. I sat back down and inhaled, letting the necktie go limp.

You cannot know the weight I carry inside this shell,
the burden of each week's growth.

You cannot know that what slows me down is not habit or nature,
but the simple heft of my own fear.

You cannot know what it feels like to be devoured,
one centimeter at a time, by your own mineral skin.

Or snatched up by some quick-lipped predator
grateful only for your lingering ways.

You cannot know the sad provisions that must be made
if I am to harbor my own secrets.

The lead of them.
The mass.

As part of their mating process, some snails produce a calcium dart that they shoot—zwing!—at a potential mate. This dart is laden with hormones that enhance the recipient's receptivity to sperm. In other words, like ancient Greek deities and cultural symbols, snails have special projectiles that make others more likely to have sex with them. And once again, an idea we people think is pretty special turns out to have been thought of first by our primeval animal forebears.

Snails have a lot to teach us about these things, you know. That body made of one glistening muscle curling into that inviting shell, the taut erectness of the stalks on which those eyes sit, the only message their primal gaze can convey being the desperate forward thrust of survival.

We could be like snails. We could coil up around each other, clacking together the ridges of the shelters we carry on our backs. We could bend, like this, at once exposing and tightening our long-suffering surfaces, on which we for some reason keep trying to get somewhere, scraping across this hard earth. We could horrify some kitchen gardener who finds us squelching around in his arugula.

As if he's any more dignified.