The Shell
It all begins with an idea.
When you were small, dreamy, and amoral, you would root around in your mother’s garden. Tepid smooth tomato skins caught between your baby teeth, tickled by the acrid furry smell of vines. Innumerable aphids and ladybugs eggs swept down the hatch, never to take flight. Underleaf, glided snails. Across your chubby palm they trekked, slower even than the raindrops you traced down bedroom window-glass, slicker too. The snails were your first geometry teachers, oozing golden ratio lectures, carrying you inward along some tiny celestial axis. Fractals emerged before your vocabulary could keep up, and you understood, at once, a fantastic secret.
Before you now, sylvan tendrils of mist rise from the sunhot meadow, exhales of earth to dark relief of night. Lanterns of many styles are strung here and there, stained glass, and thin paper; pure shimmering crystal sending shards of light into the surrounding copse. Candles abound, hanging improbably from intricate cobweb wire, illuminating the silken paisley canopies. Strange windows cast strange reliefs from the structure before you which, of course, is a shell. Someone a little clever, or quite more than a little mad, has enchanted a snail shell to grow to the size of a large potting shed, intimidatingly tall, ungainly, yet charming, nonetheless. The shell seems to hang from the sky, as the candles hang from the webs, familiar and alien at the exact same time. As you study the flickers of lamplight over the grooving helix, you are struck with an odd sense of prehistory. Is it truly an enchanted shell, or has someone unearthed an antediluvian species of nautilus, a colossal ammonite entity, back from the grave of the past? Who would even think to do such a thing? And then there is the matter of the bicycle.
