Karma

It was a sadistic way to kill but it brought her much satisfaction. Who knew that a storecupboard ingredient could be so harmful to a creature when it was used by others merely to season their food?

She was fed up with the broad, leathery leaves of her hostas looking like an errant child with a craft punch had attacked them indiscriminately, turning them into doilies for a frog's tea party. She felt it reflected badly on her as a gardener, allowing these insurgents to constantly attack her plants, leaving them ragged. She imagined what it must be like for the leaves to be torn by tiny teeth, to be coated with a layer of silver slime and to know that they were now weakened and exposed to other perils, such as disease.

She did not allow such empathy when she watched the slugs fizzing with their newly acquired white coating. She did not imagine them writhing in agony or their bewilderment at their assault with salt.

She'd woken up that morning, pulled back the curtains and the glass of her patio doors were coated with the pale underbellies of slugs. Actually, there were only six, but the sight of their squidgy flesh so readily exposed when she had merely wanted to let in the day, had angered her. How dare they! Repulsed, she immediately tore off some kitchen towel, slipped on some shoes and headed out with the salt.

When she got to the patio, there were more; again, not an inordinate amount but enough for her to need to take immediate action. She took the kitchen towel and ensuring that her fingers were completely covered, she started to pluck the slugs off the glass and place them on the floor ready for execution.

Littering the ground were the petals of the clematis that draped itself over the doors. Its pretty pink flowers glistened like little stars in the grey morning and she looked up from under them, pausing from her gruesome task.

It was at this moment that a precariously balanced slug, clinging to one of the clematis' tendrils, was nudged by a gust of wind to land perfectly on her forehead.

***

365 words

Those of you who have read my stuff over time will know that I dislike slugs. I have had close encounters of the squidgy kind with them before and would rather they kept themselves to themselves. However, slugs have to eat, I know and so I tolerate them - for the most part. But the thought of them on my skin? Ugh.

Here is a poem using limericks that I wrote about them:

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