One night she was woken by a noise coming from one of the living room windows. Of course, it was nothing. But she wasn’t yet used to being alone in that big house and was easily frightened. Before going back to bed, she went to the kitchen for water. She didn’t have her lenses in and everything was a confused blur, shadows within shadows. She thought it must be about three, maybe four in the morning because she was emerging from a dense fog of disconnection. Her senses were divorced from her body and she found it hard to make her way. The cat appeared behind her and arched its back as if its stomach were about to shoot off an arrow toward the center of the earth. It purred its confusion, demanding breakfast from between her legs, and she almost tripped over it.
When she opened the refrigerator and the white pearl lit up the rectangle—the green floor, the marble worktop, the faucet, and all the other things that stood silently like grazing cattle seen in the distance—she saw a dark form on one of the blue wall tiles. The glasses were on that side of the kitchen. She’d intended to feel for one in the dish rack but was so deeply in the grip of the fear that had woken her, so prepared for disaster, that she decided to go back to the bedroom to put in her lenses before doing anything else. The cat jumped onto the bed again. She returned to the kitchen and realized that the dark shape was a slug. Had that repulsive mollusk been inside the glass? Best not to use it now and, in the morning, rinse it out thoroughly. She grabbed the plastic bottle filled with water from the faucet that had been chilling in the fridge. As she walked along the hallway, she took a swig from the neck. The thought that she’d come close to touching the slug, that it was still there, made her shudder. But it surely couldn’t, or so she imagined, move very far.
In the morning, there was no trace of it. She put down a bowl of food for the cat, then she wiped the sticky-sweet smear on the worktop with detergent and then bleach. And her day went by as other days had, and that night she went to bed but couldn’t sleep. One thing after another passed through her head as if her skull were a miserable black hole. The same gravity that kept her stable, propped against the pillow, began to press down on the images entering her mind, crushing them flat. Perhaps they were clips from other people’s heads, and as those people were able to sleep, the clips had taken up residence in hers, with all its available electricity.
She got up to make herself a cup of lime flower tea. Just in case, she put in her lenses and found her slippers. And in the flickering of the cold strip light, she saw three of them. White light fell on the room with the conclusiveness of a thing that in itself is wholly itself, and she immediately knew that this had been going on before, but as she never used to wake in the night, she hadn’t been aware of it.
When he was living in the house she’d slept soundly, straight through until her cell phone alarm rang. And she sometimes even allowed herself the luxury of ignoring it. Her love was the shell of that amazing mythical turtle that carries on its back elephants, which in turn carry the whole flat world on theirs. And she used to be there, on that fine, safe Tetris. These days, just to have company, she didn’t let the cat out at night, even though it woke up before her and bit and scratched to get whatever it wanted, and she’d be forced to further interrupt her sleep putting it out. And by then the sun would be rising, and what was the point of keeping up the charade? The presence of the cat didn’t make her any less alone. Yet, at that moment, she was glad it was there, and in some way expected its assistance. If it ate moths and flies, maybe it could also save her from this.
She spotted a slug on one of the wall tiles. Was it the same one? It was very close to where she’d seen the last one. There was another on a plate, bottom sweeping. She swore she’d never use that plate again, would smash it on the patio if necessary, even if it did belong to him. And the last slug, almost indistinguishable from the collection of stones on the worktop, was only inches from the microwave. She had no idea what to do. Not just one, but three slugs! She grabbed a can of Raid and sprayed.
The following day, she found nothing and was certain that they must be nocturnal. And that they had teeth, even on their tongues. At three in the morning, after waiting a reasonable time, she went exploring again. The number had doubled. One was climbing up the tall cabinet and another was even perched on the side of a knife she’d left to dry.
Google said: if you put out a glass of beer, the slugs go for the yeast and die, stupefied by their thirst.
So she bought some beer. She drank a little that evening, with the cat squirming in her lap as she watched one of the movies he’d always vetoed. There was still quite a lot left; she’d never really liked beer. She placed the glass in front of the stove, in the middle of the green kitchen floor gleaming with bleach. And that night she slept through without waking. It was the alcohol, or weariness, or just one thing on top of another. In the morning, she got out of bed and went straight to the kitchen to brew the maté, without putting in her lenses or even remembering her little homemade trap. That was when her bare feet collided with the glass.
Ah, they were the source of her revulsion. Not the rest of it.
She cried a little, unsure whether it was for the slugs, her home, or him. For herself. So, she cried for quite a long time, as if it were a form of entertainment or her tears were some kind of watery celebration. Maybe it felt good to have a more trivial excuse for feeling low. Something that wasn’t, for just one minute, her stupid heart that had plummeted down from cloud nine.
That night, when she woke to make an inspection, she found a dozen. Had her attack made them multiply or had they called up a secret army? Where had they all come from? How did they manage to reproduce so rapidly? Long, moist, sturdy bodies littered surfaces in outlandish, defiant positions. She thought she’d go crazy with disgust. She took salt from a cupboard and, without discrimination or even direction, began to sprinkle it about. The white, impalpable shower martyred several, but not all the slugs. When they began to dissolve, she felt her stomach churn.
As she had no desire to clear up dead slugs from among the living ones, she went back to bed, closed the door, and stayed there with the cat. Her brain was working along these lines: if I fall asleep, it will all die for a while and so will I, and maybe tomorrow something will have sorted out the night for me.
She’d also had those kinds of thoughts when he was still with her, in the big house they had fixed up, painted, and redesigned together. The house they had filled with marvelous objects; objects she now observed in the same way the glass eyes of those stuffed animals some people have on their walls observe their surroundings. Except that these days those objects seemed lifeless. The invading slugs were more alive.
Despite her heaving stomach, she put on a pair of rubber gloves, poured more bleach on the floor, and set to work with the mop and cloth. The cat was mooching around, hoping to find something useful. She disinfected. Then, one by one, she opened all the compartments in the kitchen, moving the saucepans, plates, Tupperware containers, jars, and packets. The cat happily nosed about in those hiding places. But, like someone returning from a restful vacation, it brought back no news. Where were they coming from? Where did the slugs spend the day? How did they get into the kitchen? Or were they already hidden there, camouflaged, when she was walking around restlessly, making noise, and the sun was progressing from one window to the next. She wanted to find their origin.
And so the days passed. One after another, all seemingly alike. Every time she opened the front door, she expected to find him there. When he wasn’t, she felt as if a hammer were knocking her into the floor with a single blow, flattening her to the surface. She cried into his shirts, into the curtains, with her nose in the cap of the bottle of cologne he’d left behind. She hugged the jackets on the clothes hangers in the walk-in closet—they were at almost the same height he’d been during all those years, receiving her with love. She talked to the cat, talked to herself. Neighbors asked cruel questions. But then, is there really any question that isn’t, in essence, an act of cruelty, a test of resilience? She scrutinized those neighbors at lunchtime, watched the cars pass by outside, watched the buses pass by, the sun pass by, the clouds pass by. She lay on the big bed and listened to the creaking in her temples, old wooden stairs that her ghosts ascended. She rehearsed conversations and was filled with rage. Her anger was a way of avoiding the pain.
It was only at night that she thought of the slugs: when she got out of bed to check—now without the energy to do anything about them—if they were still multiplying. The cat growled at them, its jaw trembling; she’d seen it like that once before, when it had killed a pigeon on the roof and then hidden it as a present under a plant in one of the flowerbeds. He’d picked it up by its bloodied wing and put it in a bag. But the cat did nothing more than growl. What could it do when faced with slugs? She wasn’t any better.
The number doubled every night. She could no longer count them.
They had taken on the communal form of a tide, and now reached halfway across the kitchen floor and up the wall tiles. Piled on top of one another, they gave the impression of being about to pronounce, in unison, a single word, perhaps a name. She thought it strange that a formation of that size didn’t emit any sound. She considered trying the salt again, but already knew what would happen the next day. She considered calling someone, but the truth was that she didn’t want to talk to anybody, not even to give instructions. She wondered again during the day about where all those slugs went. She checked the whole house. Nothing anywhere. But things were different in the daytime, her mind was occupied with the hologram of the last time she’d seen him, in the garden, his back turned to her.
And there were all kinds of other, ordinary things to occupy that mind: her accounts, the rent, repairs, the future, her horoscope, which hadn’t been at all positive lately, and the advice that arrived in bunches of inutility, and the messages—disguised commiserations—from friends, and the assistants in the bakery across the road who corralled her with their suggestions. Even so, she’d get out of bed to check on the slugs’ progress, wanting to know the extent of the hell that was expanding in her kitchen. She used lipstick to draw lines on the floor, the way you mark the wall to record a child’s growth. The next night, there would be many more, the red line already swamped by the tide. The kitchen was a huge blob, an oleaginous river occupying every space, right up to the ceiling. She’d stand before it and watch those quivering, living creatures, their feelers, the outline of their soft internal shields. They were an enormous stagnant animal: some higher power controlled those gelatinous individuals. What was to be done? She had no idea, and so she did nothing.
One night, she found that they had reached the dining room and crawled up onto the chairs and the table. She wept a little, but as tears were now nothing unusual for her, she went back to bed. The cat, twisting and turning at the end of the mattress, no longer even bothered to wake for these inspections. In the morning, they had vanished again. She prepared the maté and walked through the now empty rooms. She watered the plants. Nothing.
Some days later, their advance had reached the living room, but, like floodwater, the current took an unexpected turn and, instead of covering that large space, veered into the hallway leading to the bedroom. He’d come around to take away items of furniture and pack the things in his drawers. He’d taken, for instance, the shirts she used to cry into.
She made mental lists of the empty spaces around the house. Where there had been armchairs, the coffee table, the huge television they had inherited, the magnificent bronze lamp, were now disturbing absences. She stared at the things she could no longer touch and couldn’t overcome her astonishment. The cat was confused. It meowed, demanding the comfortable chair where it lazed away the afternoons. She meowed a little too, just to try it out, but nothing of what had been taken reappeared.
By the time she recovered sufficient energy to check on the slugs in her drowsy state, the most daring were lapping up against the bedroom door. She stood before them and saw that, farther back, the joints between things were moving crazily. She raised the blinds just a few inches, opened the window to let in fresh air, and returned to bed. There were so many of them! What did they want?
The following day, everything was dry. Almost clean. But anyway, she wiped the surfaces with bleach, until the bottle was empty. Then she went to the store for more. She also bought fruit, wine, bread, and cheese. Things like that, which she put in the refrigerator. She fed the cat.
Each night, she serenely observed how their boundaries extended. She took everything from the floor, rearranged her shoes. She washed clothes, swept under the bed, and realized that the floor down there was thick with dust. How long had it been there? And, come to that, where did it all come from? Who made it and where? Who dropped it among the people, furniture, slugs? She piled up the three coins she found to give them some meaning.
That night, she got up and saw that they were at the foot of her bed. She was lying diagonally, no longer keeping to her own side. Two days later, although every surface was by then covered, they were still creeping over the floating flooring they had chosen together; pale, gleaming wood to reflect the daylight. Would the flooring be ruined? It wasn’t supposed to get wet. The seams between the planks would open up. They’d been warned that humidity damaged it. From the bed, she could see the slimy ocean. That night, the cat didn’t sleep; it growled until morning.
But she did sleep.
It was five o’clock when she woke; outside, the darkness was tinged with light. Had she woken in the morning or the afternoon? She wasn’t sure. How long had she slept? In any case, the inevitable had happened: a slug was crawling on her bed. The time had come. She picked it up by its tail, opened her mouth, and swallowed it. She congratulated herself on having slept so well the previous night: she still had a lot of work ahead of her. 
Valeria Tentoni, born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in 1985, is a writer and journalist. She is the author of several poetry books, including Antitierra, Piedras preciosas, and Hologramas. She is also the author of children’s books, such as Viaje al fondo del río, and two short story collections: El sistema del silencio and Furia diamante. In 2022 she won the first Marta Brunet Latin American Short Story Contest in Chile.
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning translator who has worked with such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Julián Herbert, Jazmina Barrera, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to many anthologies of Latin American literature and has published shorter translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms.
