Field guide No. 852
Double ended garden snail
Two ends, one slow commute
A garden snail has a head at each end of its long body on wet pavement. Neither one can claim to be bringing up the rear.
Field noteOne snail has a head at each end of its body. Neither direction gets right of way.
- Specimen
- No. 852
- Genus
- Generated
- Kind
- Impossible (the round square kind)
- Breaks
- Category
- Where it doesn’t exist
- Wet paving after rain.
- Nearest existing relative
- A single-shelled land snail.
- Filed in Fresh slop as
- Surreal
Also impossible, also breaking category
Yellow gloves wring a steel chainWringing squeezes water out of cloth. This chain gives up little chains, as if steel were wet.
Peel backBoulder’s shadow lifts off the wet sand at the far end like a strip of tape.
The chair's impossible treeA shadow is a chair’s outline or it isn’t a chair’s shadow. This one is a tree’s, cast by a chair.
Fossil lightning across the cliffStone keeps bones and shells. A flash lasting a thousandth of a second has no body to leave, yet here it is, set.