Cry Little Sister
1
Gerard is what you’d call an escargot prep specialist. He works in a dry room shut off from sunlight, surrounded by white pine containers full of Helix aspersa, AKA brown garden snails. All day long he feeds them bran to cleanse their digestive tracts; snail waste is toxic to humans. He doesn’t mind being the only EPS on site. Contact with the other workers tends to leave a bad taste in his mouth.
“Yes mother,” he grunts into the cell phone. He does this whenever he senses a break in the monologue.
“I would not ask if it was not crucial.”
“Dinner with the freak you married is crucial?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” The snails scrape their teeth over the bran, the body-long foot of each working overtime to push/pull them along. “So you, me, Wasserman, and a Christless Cuban pork
