It was a dark and stormy night…

a big, blundering woman had lost her glasses. She muttered under her breath, and a memory of childhood, a sharp light amid the rain and astigmatism, came to her quite unasked for. It happened often in this tiring town. The sky, always so bleakly white, summoned memories of a deep blue, and the rain, so frequent and so cold, recalled a blazing sunny sidewalk where scrambled eggs had once or twice been cooked. She was no longer here, but there. She was not in the present, on the dirt, robbed of economically valuable possessions, but was rather a child twenty years ago entering a vine-wrapped, darkly dulcet forest where certainly no mortal girls had ever seen. It was breathtaking. It was filled with magic. It was terribly lonely, she realized. The twelve year old girl who had once played in the forest of her own will, deaf and blind, had at some point became a thirty-two year old girl who remembered unwillingly, without roots in a world of wind and rain, and still she could not see. But then a fox came up to her, nudged her, and woke her from her reverie. “Princess,” it said, “we have been awaiting your return for so very long.” Deer emerged from the darkness of the forest and came to dip their heads, and birds tweeted their cheer. An entourage of bunny bunnies, pale gray with an aura from the leaf-dappled light (komorebi) grazing their fur, chattered in loving welcome. And as her army of spiral-shelled snails began to mill about and slide above the uneven forest floor, she began to recall. Out came, from nowhere but her heart, her majestic eye stalks, her royal shell. Her golden scepter slammed to the ground. “The Queen of the Forest, Princess of Snails welcomes her subjects,” declared the queen of the forest, princess of snails, snails being the only living things that ever truly understood her feelings both in her childhood and her vanished adult life. Their slow, plodding habits. Their disgusting nature. The mess they left everywhere. But also their inevitable emergence after a storm, and their determination never, ever to give up. The snails, using their eyestalks, cheered in silent chorus at the return of their queen. At last, when the sun rose and the rain parted, snails were everywhere on the street, and she was just another, and though snails mostly went dumbly in circles, hopefully one of those snails would find the destination it was searching for, and hopefully it would be her.