Scum Trails
by Christian De Matteo
The scum trail led up the hood and onto the windshield, where, overcome by the sun, the slug had dried and died, leaving the foulness of itself gummed against the pristine glass. Carter – 46 and smack-dab in the throes of a lusty mid-life crisis – boiled, his brand-new Corvette ZR1 befouled by this lowest form of life. How dare it rise beyond its dirt-groveling fate and touch this marvel of thumb-wielding ingenuity? Its filth had dulled its sense of place.
Angry, he lit a cigarette (a teenage rebellion he’d recently reignited) and traced the scummy path down the orange matte hood.
Photo by Christian De Matteo
There was, he saw, an art to it. Little whorls and accents made up the slime trail, a painting of the oddity and thoughtfulness of nature. He ground out the cigarette on the asphalt parking area of his apartment complex – he’d lost the house after Mary found him writhing atop the neighbor’s bored nineteen-year-old daughter – and looked closer. Moments passed.
Something grand lay in the crisped mucus. A sign of the vast complexity of an aware universe, of a God who would put such detail into even the slime trail of a lowly slug. Yet the slug couldn’t possibly have known this, couldn’t have had the sentience to grasp the eternity of evolution written in its own posterior leavings. The slug could have had no awareness the machinations of its mobility were magnificent.
Carter leaned closer, his nose centimeters away from the dried evidence of the slug’s existence, of his final ride for glory, the slug’s ascendant masterpiece. Using only its own biology – a marvel of viscous goo, lubricant or adhesive upon demand – the slug had moved upward. Carter tracked the trail backward, down the hood, over the perilous, pitfall-laden grill, along the undercarriage – by necessity accomplished upside-down – to the grueling stretch which progress from the tire to the fender must have necessitated. He studied the path up the tire, the trail showing easy acceptance of the grooves and meanderings scored into the rubber. Acceptance but never distraction from purpose. He followed the trail to the ground, the burning asphalt gauntlet the slug had left safe grass and dirt to accept.
In its final hours the slug had brushed beauty beyond the synesthesia of Van Gogh across a canvas of poorly laid blacktop.
He followed a few steps farther and stopped at the cigarette. He’d ground it into the trail.
Carter continued looking at the slug’s progression, at the final evidence of a life lived. He dropped the car keys into his front pocket and bent over to pick up the fieldstripped butt of his cigarette. Aging spine singing small notes of protest, he dropped to a quietly tweaking knee to examine the damage. He lowered his face to the asphalt and softly blew the ashes from the scum trail, then reassessed. Carter butted gravity away enough to stand again and walk back to the sterile, undecorated apartment, back to the suitcases tossed open, clothes limp over their zipper-toothed sides like half-masticated chicken flesh forgotten on the lips of a lolling, lonely, senile mouth.
Ten minutes later he returned, a soft clothing brush in his hand. He lay in the way he remembered his now estranged children had when playing in the dirt, and carefully concentrated on cleaning the embedded ash from the slug’s desiccating trail.