Small Places : Nick L Belardes [76 of 128]

• Twenty-Four.
• Downstairs Joan is lying on her back in the middle of the parking lot smoking a cigarette. "You need to get up," I say.
• Joan won't look at me. "I knew it would be me. I'll kill that no good..." Me: "I don't think Milt can be killed. He's not human."
• That evening I walk home, wondering if Joan will be lying in the parking lot covered in classifieds when I return the next day.
• Outside my front door five snails hang on the wall. I start to feel like one of them, escaping the water from the garden, barely clinging.
• I go to sleep dreaming about a starry canopy and moonlit snails on the run from a mad gardener who looks like Milt with a crooked hoe.
• In the dream I grow squishy suction cup feet that stick to the ground as I run. Milt gains on me and takes a swing with his hoe.
• He chops my feet off but I instantly grow new ones as I slither into a sewer. This seems to be the darkest place I can imagine.
• Inside the sewer are other frightened bugs. Snails with broken, oozing shells huddle in a corner. A cockroach with one antenna shivers.