JonathanManley
01-19-2016, 04:13 AM
The two boys stood in silence on the small patch of lawn, the escalated shouts of their game having been brought to a halt by Joe's mother's interjection.
'Well Joe, what can you hear? Now that you've stopped your shouting what can you hear?'
Joe resisted the temptation to give a sarcastic reply, and gave the answer he knew she was seeking,
'Nothing Mum'.
'Exactly. Nothing. No-one else for miles around is making a sound apart from you which means that everyone for miles around can hear you. Everyone for miles around has probably been listening to you and they're probably getting annoyed by you. Instead of sitting in their gardens enjoying the nice quiet afternoon.'
Joe remained contrite in his responses, for the remainder of the conversation, having heard this speech many times before. His friend Alex however was hearing, what Joe called, the ' Miles Around' speech for the first time, listening closely to every word. A sense of embarrassment flushed Alex's his face hot at the thought that the entire town might have heard their noisy games.
Both boys had been equally loud, though it was Joe, as Alex's host, to whom the speech was solely directed ; with Alex enjoying the kind of immunity that he found often came with being a guest at a school-friends house.
As Joe's mother stepped back into the house's side door, leaving it open behind her, the two boys remained silent on the patch of lawn for a moment. Joe waited until he was certain that his mother was out of earshot before quietly saying '**** off Mum', softly enough to be certain that his words would barely travel beyond the square of lawn.
Alex sniggered, downplaying his surprise at Joe's use of a newly acquired curse word,
'I've heard Dad tell her to **** off before. He's never said it to me, but I've heard him say it. I'm not allowed to say that word, but he does, and he's right... **** off Mum!'
Joe hissed the phrase with more confidence on its second airing, though still at a volume he knew would be safe. This time both boys laughed out loud, far more entertained by the taboo of the word itself **** - than by its actual application or context.
It was just after three o'clock on a pale August afternoon, of a Lancashire day that had up to this point seen very little sunshine. At some stage during the boys' brief visit from Joe's mother, or perhaps just before it, the sky had brightened, with a chilly afternoon sun now finding its way between the clouds, down to the fir tree enclosed front garden.
'I know what we can do', Joe said, before sprinting the ten yards across the lawn and disappearing into the house's open door.
Alex had replied sharply with 'What?' as Joe turned, but this seemed to go unheard. As the younger of the two by almost a full school year, Alex was used to many of his questions and observations going completely unheard by his friend.
Seconds later Joe returned from the house, silently closing it's door as he exited it. In Joe's hand, Alex could see a small magnifying glass. Before the object was fully visible, Alex was already intrigued by it. He could tell at a glance that it was not a toy, and knew that it must have been borrowed from one of Joe's parents, probably his Dad, who at still at work for the
day.
'Mum said we could use this to play detectives,' Joe announced, his freckly face beaming with a smug expression.
'Detectives? That sounds crap!' Alex answered, using a recently en vogue swear word, that had been put out of style in favour of newer, stronger words.
'It's not actually for being a detective you can burn things with it when the sun's out'.
Joe demonstrated the process by tilting the magnifying glass above a holly leaf, that he 'd pulled from a nearby bush. He drew the glass back from the leaf as it lay on a patio stone, until the sun created a small brightly illuminated spotlight upon its green surface, that quickly gave way to a neatly scorched round hole.
The two school-friends made their way across the garden taking turns to refract the weak sunbeams enough to scorch holes through leaves, and starting small flumes of smoke from gathered balls of cut grass. Each time the boys took care to shield their activity from the house and to keep watch for Joe's mother, ensuring she didn't learn what the real purpose of the magnifying glass was.
Both boys were having fun. Alex had never even considered the idea that a magnifying glass could be used in such a way, and thought to himself that it was certainly a great deal more fun than any of the toys or games they had been playing with earlier in the day.
In a fleeting moment when Alex was in control of the magnifying glass his curiosity led him close to moving the small white spot of light onto Joe's neck, as he crouched in front of him studying the ground for more objects to burn. Alex knew it wouldn't end well if he did it, but as with so many of the ideas that Alex had, his curiosity to 'see what would happen' clouded his reasoning.
Alex was in the process of weighing up his curiosity against the consequences of burning his friend's neck, when Joe unknowingly saved himself, by suddenly leaning back and turning his head to offer a new idea,
'I'll show you something that's really cool now'.
With a satisfied expression on his face Joe rose to his feet,
'Find a rock and follow me.'
The boys travelled to the garden's furthest point from the house, a blind spot from its windows, that was obscured by a large bush that badly needed trimming. Here they were well out of earshot of Joe's mother, and both crouched at the edge of the smaller of the garden's two patches of lawn. A small compost filled flowerbed, no more than a meter wide cordoned off one of the rectangular lawn's corners, raised about two feet above the ground level. The flowerbed itself wasn't much to look at, with only three or four irksome shrub plants growing from the soil.
'What are the rocks for?' asked Alex. Joe paused for a few seconds studying the small brick wall that separated lawn from flowerbed. Alex was about to repeat the question, when Joe answered,
'I'm going to hit this part of the wall three times slowly then you hit that part of the wall in the same way.'
Joe pointed to either end of the wall's top surface, signalling with his rock the slow stabbing motion that he would use.
Alex watched, as Joe raised his jagged rock, before knocking once, pausing, then a second time, and then after a longer pause, a third time. Alex followed his orders to the letter, hitting his target further along the wall, exactly at the spot that Joe had pointed out. He knocked for the second time, measuring his intervals to be exactly the same as Joe's; as though he was performing some magic ritual, the outcome of which he did not yet know. Alex briefly looked back down at his target, to ensure he made the correct pause before the third knock, but as he did so he stopped himself, seeing that the mission was already accomplished. The wall was now alive with an increasingly large population of small brown ants.
'Told you it was cool,' Joe said with a dry, and yet excited tone in his voice,
'...I do this all the time I've seen them carrying dead flies. Dad says there must be tons of them inside there'.
Alex agreed with Joe, and for several moments the two boys sat in complete silence, watching the bustling metropolis of insects that had appeared on the wall's uneven surface, scrambling to protect their kingdom, or at least to find out what had caused the noise that had disturbed them. Alex authoritatively told Joe that the ants were probably trying to protect their queen, speaking now with the kind of knowledgeable confidence that a nature documentary's narrator might use to instruct their viewer.
For a moment Alex's comment hung without a reply, as both boys continued to gaze at the ants' defensive display. Alex imagined the alien home-world that must have laid beneath the wall, trying to picture it as a mapped network of tunnels, stretching deep underneath the raised flowerbed, perhaps even under the ground level, maybe even underneath the lawn itself. He pictured a cartoonish queen ant ordering her servants to relay a message to all the ants to go to the surface to investigate the noise. He imagined the ants arriving at the surface as soldiers, communicating with each other in corny sounding American accents; like those that he would often use to voice his many battle-hardened action figures.
By now there were hundreds of ants running in every direction over the greyish battlefield of the wall's surface. Some disappeared into gaps between cement and stone, others into spaces where the flowerbed's soil met the wall, though for every ant that returned below the surface, another new arrival seemed to replace it. The wall's surface had maintained a steady covering of bustling ant activity for more than ninety seconds when Joe spoke again,
'I know they're protecting their queen. My Dad says she's probably massive, and that she'll be sitting in there somewhere laying eggs all day. Grose!'
The last word he said with a tone of genuine disdain, and it was at this point that Joe reached for his magnifying glass which Alex had by now forgotten was lying abandoned on the lawn in between the two boys.
Joe tilted the magnifying glass with precision to harness the lukewarm, but now surprisingly bright ray of sunshine, that shone down from over the boys' shoulders. The boys' eyes were fixed on the illuminated circle in the wall as it grew smaller with Joe's hand moving slowly back from the wall's surface. His face held a cold expression, with an almost contrived look of concentration as though he was operating some piece of machinery far more technical than a simple magnifying glass. His dark eyebrows pointed down towards the centre of his face, and his lips clasped tightly shut.
Alex's thoughts turned quickly from intrigue for the inner workings of the ant home-world, to an outright curiosity as to what would become of an ant that became captured beneath the magnifying glass' laser beam.
Neither boy was surprised by the outcome, as the first victim fell to the weapon. Immediately in Alex's mind this ant was a fallen foot soldier, heroically killed in action defending his queen, bested by invaders with superior weapons. Quickly Joe moved the scope over another ant, before soon he'd claimed more than ten victims, each stopping dead in their tracks, in an instant death that left behind little more than a tiny shadow on the stone wall.
'Let me have a go!'
Alex asked, with his voice slightly raised to ensure Joe actually heard him this time,
'All right, but keep your voice down. Mum doesn't like me messing with the ant's nest, she says it's bad for the plants. She always stops me playing in this part of the garden.'
Alex spent the next sixty seconds drawing his beam onto ten or twenty ants, finding the optimum distance from which to take aim, and quickly claiming a bigger tally of kills than his friend, who twitched as he began to feel it was time for his turn again.
The ants were gradually diminishing in number, as they began to retreat to their nest. Seemingly oblivious to their fallen comrades, the defensive force appeared to have decided in the minutes since the boys had knocked on the wall, that there was no imminent threat to their way of life. Having seen this before Joe picked up his rock, noticing that he and Alex would need to knock on the wall again in the next minute or two to replenish the numbers.
The sunlight had gradually begun to dim over head, which neither Joe nor Alex had noticed, until the moment that the white spot of light under the magnifying glass seemed to instantly become too weak for it's purpose. Alex had been selecting his victims at random, and was growing frustrated at the lack of sunlight as he'd already begun targeting an ant, when suddenly a call came from Joe's mother inside the house,
'Jo-oe? Where are you? Jo-oe...'
'We better go back over there, Mum's so annoying. She tells me she's sick of hearing me out here, then she gets annoyed 'cause she can't hear me out here.'
Joe whispered, speaking with the same venom that he'd used to describe the ant's queen.
'Coming Mum, we're just 'round here.'
Quickly he snatched the magnifying glass from Alex, concealing it as he rose to his feet, it's handle tucked into his sweat-shirts cuff and the round glass clasped in the palm of his hand. Joe went inside the house, with Alex following back as far as the lawn where they had received the 'Miles around' speech.
Alex ambled up to the lawn's edge, where the grass met an outline of soil that the boys had been digging in earlier in the day. He considered the possibility that the ant's nest might stretch this far across the garden, or whether any of the ants might have made the epic journey across the lawn. He pictured an ant setting out on the journey that Alex had just made in a five second stroll, but how to the ant it would be an incredible feat, crossing dense jungles filled with countless dangers.
He thought about the ant that he had targeted last, the luckiest ant in the world, to have been spared, thanks to the combination of the failing light and Alex's mother's interruption. As Alex's mindset returned from his role as a curious invading force to that of an intrigued observer, he noticed a shape in the corner of his eye.
Joe emerged from the house, revitalised by his visit indoors, slowly bouncing a tennis ball as he walked.
'Check this out Joe., you'll think this really grose',
Alex pointed towards a large brown slug, that laid in front of the boy. Several centimetres in length, the creature lay in a still straight line, it's head raised higher than the rest of its body, with two bulbous antenna protruding significantly.
'Yuck!', said Joe, in response.
'I know', replied Alex loudly, though just narrowly concealing the full extent of his excitement at the discovery, 'He's massive isn't he!'
The slug was positioned in the very centre of a square patio stone at the lawn's edge, with a glue-stick trail of goo behind telling of it's journey from the lawn. Despite the now dim lighting and the increasingly cloudy sky overhead, the slug's body seemed to glisten. It's tall ribbed sides caught enough daylight to accentuate the contours of the slug's body, making it seem to Alex to have an impressive quality, perhaps, he considered, it was the largest beast of its kind.
'It's like a walrus.' Alex noted, a little quieter than he'd spoken before, struck by the slug's impressive size, wet-look and ale-like colour, as it lay beached on a grey concrete slab. Joe nodded in agreement with his stare still fixed upon the slug as he crouched in front of it.
'I know what...', said Joe, trailing off as he rose to his feet and sprinted back inside the house, leaving his tennis ball on that patio stone.
Suddenly Alex realized what Joe was going to get, and had a feeling in his stomach as though he'd drunk a pint of cold milk all at once. In the few minutes he'd spent with the slug, he'd felt a mix of both repulsion and intrigue.
He'd observed its trail across the concrete and wondered how long it had taken to slither it. He'd probably been slithering there, Alex thought, when the two boys had received the 'Miles around' speech, just a few meters away.
'Had the slug heard the boy's noise?' Alex thought to himself, ' Had the sound frightened him? Do slugs get frightened? Do slugs hear anything at all?',
Alex had no answers to any of these questions, but he did know that he didn't want Joe to shoot the slug with the magnifying glass, which he was sure he'd be returning with imminently. He said a silent prayer in his head without joining his palms or closing his eyes that the sky would stay cloudy, and keep the sun shining through the glass when it arrived. His stomach felt worse as he began to picture the long, fat, slow slug being scorched under the glass, as it would burn holes through it's impressive, disgusting brown hide. He knew it wouldn't just vaporize in an instant like the ants, it was far too big for that. It would sizzle and squirm and coil and writhe in agony. Alex's curiosity to bear witness to that was non existent he was already picturing it vividly enough to know that he didn't want it to happen.
Alex remained on his knees in front of the slug on it's patio slab. The creature had begun to turn slowly to the left, it's tail becoming elongated, while it's brown back continued to shimmer underneath the milky white sky.
The sky was all that Alex could look at, growing increasingly confident that it would remain too overcast to arm the magnifying glass; laser. He considered moving the slug to hide it from Joe, but he didn't dare to touch it's slimy body.
'Could a slug sting like a nettle?' he thought to himself, 'Could it attach to him like super glue?', He didn't know, but it didn't matter the sky was dull and white now like a painted ceiling
overhead.
Alex's gaze was firmly fixed on the sky when Joe appeared silently beside him, having sprinted on tipped toes, brushing into his shoulder as he crouched. Alex looked around to see Joe's outstretched arm holding a tall white plastic container of table salt above the miniature walrus.
'I told mum there was a slug eating the plants and she said to pour salt on it.', Joe said, with his eyes fixed on the narrow waterfall of fine salt as it landed a centimetre from the slug, before being fixed on it's back and gently zigzagging a white line over it's brown body.
Alex didn't say a word as he looked on, both helplessly and curiously at the creature, that had flinched immediately, clenching to two thirds of it's full size in an instant. The two boys' eyes were transfixed on the scene before them, a scene that they had jointly created.
In an instant the slug's body had transformed from a firm, thick, wet looking hide into a fizzing, melting jelly. It's calculated trail, with it's clear indication of a path that lay ahead, now stood interrupted, by a slimy dead-end containing a creature in clear distress.
Alex watched the torturous scene, with a feeling as though someone had damaged something very precious that belonged to him beyond repair, or perhaps just that he'd broken it himself. The bubbling, burning, melting demise of the walrus seemed to take minutes, and Alex found himself wishing for the animal's death to come quickly. He wished he had the magnifying glass and a big ray of sunshine to shoot it between the eyes, but even if he did, by now he couldn't really tell where it's eyes were. What had seconds earlier been a face looking up at him, with eyes and a head and a body, was now little more than a squirming messy shape. Alex thought to himself that if the slug could speak, it would be screaming.
Finally after over two minutes of long silence, Joe spoke up with a crack in his voice,
'Why would Mum tell me to do that?'.
'Well Joe, what can you hear? Now that you've stopped your shouting what can you hear?'
Joe resisted the temptation to give a sarcastic reply, and gave the answer he knew she was seeking,
'Nothing Mum'.
'Exactly. Nothing. No-one else for miles around is making a sound apart from you which means that everyone for miles around can hear you. Everyone for miles around has probably been listening to you and they're probably getting annoyed by you. Instead of sitting in their gardens enjoying the nice quiet afternoon.'
Joe remained contrite in his responses, for the remainder of the conversation, having heard this speech many times before. His friend Alex however was hearing, what Joe called, the ' Miles Around' speech for the first time, listening closely to every word. A sense of embarrassment flushed Alex's his face hot at the thought that the entire town might have heard their noisy games.
Both boys had been equally loud, though it was Joe, as Alex's host, to whom the speech was solely directed ; with Alex enjoying the kind of immunity that he found often came with being a guest at a school-friends house.
As Joe's mother stepped back into the house's side door, leaving it open behind her, the two boys remained silent on the patch of lawn for a moment. Joe waited until he was certain that his mother was out of earshot before quietly saying '**** off Mum', softly enough to be certain that his words would barely travel beyond the square of lawn.
Alex sniggered, downplaying his surprise at Joe's use of a newly acquired curse word,
'I've heard Dad tell her to **** off before. He's never said it to me, but I've heard him say it. I'm not allowed to say that word, but he does, and he's right... **** off Mum!'
Joe hissed the phrase with more confidence on its second airing, though still at a volume he knew would be safe. This time both boys laughed out loud, far more entertained by the taboo of the word itself **** - than by its actual application or context.
It was just after three o'clock on a pale August afternoon, of a Lancashire day that had up to this point seen very little sunshine. At some stage during the boys' brief visit from Joe's mother, or perhaps just before it, the sky had brightened, with a chilly afternoon sun now finding its way between the clouds, down to the fir tree enclosed front garden.
'I know what we can do', Joe said, before sprinting the ten yards across the lawn and disappearing into the house's open door.
Alex had replied sharply with 'What?' as Joe turned, but this seemed to go unheard. As the younger of the two by almost a full school year, Alex was used to many of his questions and observations going completely unheard by his friend.
Seconds later Joe returned from the house, silently closing it's door as he exited it. In Joe's hand, Alex could see a small magnifying glass. Before the object was fully visible, Alex was already intrigued by it. He could tell at a glance that it was not a toy, and knew that it must have been borrowed from one of Joe's parents, probably his Dad, who at still at work for the
day.
'Mum said we could use this to play detectives,' Joe announced, his freckly face beaming with a smug expression.
'Detectives? That sounds crap!' Alex answered, using a recently en vogue swear word, that had been put out of style in favour of newer, stronger words.
'It's not actually for being a detective you can burn things with it when the sun's out'.
Joe demonstrated the process by tilting the magnifying glass above a holly leaf, that he 'd pulled from a nearby bush. He drew the glass back from the leaf as it lay on a patio stone, until the sun created a small brightly illuminated spotlight upon its green surface, that quickly gave way to a neatly scorched round hole.
The two school-friends made their way across the garden taking turns to refract the weak sunbeams enough to scorch holes through leaves, and starting small flumes of smoke from gathered balls of cut grass. Each time the boys took care to shield their activity from the house and to keep watch for Joe's mother, ensuring she didn't learn what the real purpose of the magnifying glass was.
Both boys were having fun. Alex had never even considered the idea that a magnifying glass could be used in such a way, and thought to himself that it was certainly a great deal more fun than any of the toys or games they had been playing with earlier in the day.
In a fleeting moment when Alex was in control of the magnifying glass his curiosity led him close to moving the small white spot of light onto Joe's neck, as he crouched in front of him studying the ground for more objects to burn. Alex knew it wouldn't end well if he did it, but as with so many of the ideas that Alex had, his curiosity to 'see what would happen' clouded his reasoning.
Alex was in the process of weighing up his curiosity against the consequences of burning his friend's neck, when Joe unknowingly saved himself, by suddenly leaning back and turning his head to offer a new idea,
'I'll show you something that's really cool now'.
With a satisfied expression on his face Joe rose to his feet,
'Find a rock and follow me.'
The boys travelled to the garden's furthest point from the house, a blind spot from its windows, that was obscured by a large bush that badly needed trimming. Here they were well out of earshot of Joe's mother, and both crouched at the edge of the smaller of the garden's two patches of lawn. A small compost filled flowerbed, no more than a meter wide cordoned off one of the rectangular lawn's corners, raised about two feet above the ground level. The flowerbed itself wasn't much to look at, with only three or four irksome shrub plants growing from the soil.
'What are the rocks for?' asked Alex. Joe paused for a few seconds studying the small brick wall that separated lawn from flowerbed. Alex was about to repeat the question, when Joe answered,
'I'm going to hit this part of the wall three times slowly then you hit that part of the wall in the same way.'
Joe pointed to either end of the wall's top surface, signalling with his rock the slow stabbing motion that he would use.
Alex watched, as Joe raised his jagged rock, before knocking once, pausing, then a second time, and then after a longer pause, a third time. Alex followed his orders to the letter, hitting his target further along the wall, exactly at the spot that Joe had pointed out. He knocked for the second time, measuring his intervals to be exactly the same as Joe's; as though he was performing some magic ritual, the outcome of which he did not yet know. Alex briefly looked back down at his target, to ensure he made the correct pause before the third knock, but as he did so he stopped himself, seeing that the mission was already accomplished. The wall was now alive with an increasingly large population of small brown ants.
'Told you it was cool,' Joe said with a dry, and yet excited tone in his voice,
'...I do this all the time I've seen them carrying dead flies. Dad says there must be tons of them inside there'.
Alex agreed with Joe, and for several moments the two boys sat in complete silence, watching the bustling metropolis of insects that had appeared on the wall's uneven surface, scrambling to protect their kingdom, or at least to find out what had caused the noise that had disturbed them. Alex authoritatively told Joe that the ants were probably trying to protect their queen, speaking now with the kind of knowledgeable confidence that a nature documentary's narrator might use to instruct their viewer.
For a moment Alex's comment hung without a reply, as both boys continued to gaze at the ants' defensive display. Alex imagined the alien home-world that must have laid beneath the wall, trying to picture it as a mapped network of tunnels, stretching deep underneath the raised flowerbed, perhaps even under the ground level, maybe even underneath the lawn itself. He pictured a cartoonish queen ant ordering her servants to relay a message to all the ants to go to the surface to investigate the noise. He imagined the ants arriving at the surface as soldiers, communicating with each other in corny sounding American accents; like those that he would often use to voice his many battle-hardened action figures.
By now there were hundreds of ants running in every direction over the greyish battlefield of the wall's surface. Some disappeared into gaps between cement and stone, others into spaces where the flowerbed's soil met the wall, though for every ant that returned below the surface, another new arrival seemed to replace it. The wall's surface had maintained a steady covering of bustling ant activity for more than ninety seconds when Joe spoke again,
'I know they're protecting their queen. My Dad says she's probably massive, and that she'll be sitting in there somewhere laying eggs all day. Grose!'
The last word he said with a tone of genuine disdain, and it was at this point that Joe reached for his magnifying glass which Alex had by now forgotten was lying abandoned on the lawn in between the two boys.
Joe tilted the magnifying glass with precision to harness the lukewarm, but now surprisingly bright ray of sunshine, that shone down from over the boys' shoulders. The boys' eyes were fixed on the illuminated circle in the wall as it grew smaller with Joe's hand moving slowly back from the wall's surface. His face held a cold expression, with an almost contrived look of concentration as though he was operating some piece of machinery far more technical than a simple magnifying glass. His dark eyebrows pointed down towards the centre of his face, and his lips clasped tightly shut.
Alex's thoughts turned quickly from intrigue for the inner workings of the ant home-world, to an outright curiosity as to what would become of an ant that became captured beneath the magnifying glass' laser beam.
Neither boy was surprised by the outcome, as the first victim fell to the weapon. Immediately in Alex's mind this ant was a fallen foot soldier, heroically killed in action defending his queen, bested by invaders with superior weapons. Quickly Joe moved the scope over another ant, before soon he'd claimed more than ten victims, each stopping dead in their tracks, in an instant death that left behind little more than a tiny shadow on the stone wall.
'Let me have a go!'
Alex asked, with his voice slightly raised to ensure Joe actually heard him this time,
'All right, but keep your voice down. Mum doesn't like me messing with the ant's nest, she says it's bad for the plants. She always stops me playing in this part of the garden.'
Alex spent the next sixty seconds drawing his beam onto ten or twenty ants, finding the optimum distance from which to take aim, and quickly claiming a bigger tally of kills than his friend, who twitched as he began to feel it was time for his turn again.
The ants were gradually diminishing in number, as they began to retreat to their nest. Seemingly oblivious to their fallen comrades, the defensive force appeared to have decided in the minutes since the boys had knocked on the wall, that there was no imminent threat to their way of life. Having seen this before Joe picked up his rock, noticing that he and Alex would need to knock on the wall again in the next minute or two to replenish the numbers.
The sunlight had gradually begun to dim over head, which neither Joe nor Alex had noticed, until the moment that the white spot of light under the magnifying glass seemed to instantly become too weak for it's purpose. Alex had been selecting his victims at random, and was growing frustrated at the lack of sunlight as he'd already begun targeting an ant, when suddenly a call came from Joe's mother inside the house,
'Jo-oe? Where are you? Jo-oe...'
'We better go back over there, Mum's so annoying. She tells me she's sick of hearing me out here, then she gets annoyed 'cause she can't hear me out here.'
Joe whispered, speaking with the same venom that he'd used to describe the ant's queen.
'Coming Mum, we're just 'round here.'
Quickly he snatched the magnifying glass from Alex, concealing it as he rose to his feet, it's handle tucked into his sweat-shirts cuff and the round glass clasped in the palm of his hand. Joe went inside the house, with Alex following back as far as the lawn where they had received the 'Miles around' speech.
Alex ambled up to the lawn's edge, where the grass met an outline of soil that the boys had been digging in earlier in the day. He considered the possibility that the ant's nest might stretch this far across the garden, or whether any of the ants might have made the epic journey across the lawn. He pictured an ant setting out on the journey that Alex had just made in a five second stroll, but how to the ant it would be an incredible feat, crossing dense jungles filled with countless dangers.
He thought about the ant that he had targeted last, the luckiest ant in the world, to have been spared, thanks to the combination of the failing light and Alex's mother's interruption. As Alex's mindset returned from his role as a curious invading force to that of an intrigued observer, he noticed a shape in the corner of his eye.
Joe emerged from the house, revitalised by his visit indoors, slowly bouncing a tennis ball as he walked.
'Check this out Joe., you'll think this really grose',
Alex pointed towards a large brown slug, that laid in front of the boy. Several centimetres in length, the creature lay in a still straight line, it's head raised higher than the rest of its body, with two bulbous antenna protruding significantly.
'Yuck!', said Joe, in response.
'I know', replied Alex loudly, though just narrowly concealing the full extent of his excitement at the discovery, 'He's massive isn't he!'
The slug was positioned in the very centre of a square patio stone at the lawn's edge, with a glue-stick trail of goo behind telling of it's journey from the lawn. Despite the now dim lighting and the increasingly cloudy sky overhead, the slug's body seemed to glisten. It's tall ribbed sides caught enough daylight to accentuate the contours of the slug's body, making it seem to Alex to have an impressive quality, perhaps, he considered, it was the largest beast of its kind.
'It's like a walrus.' Alex noted, a little quieter than he'd spoken before, struck by the slug's impressive size, wet-look and ale-like colour, as it lay beached on a grey concrete slab. Joe nodded in agreement with his stare still fixed upon the slug as he crouched in front of it.
'I know what...', said Joe, trailing off as he rose to his feet and sprinted back inside the house, leaving his tennis ball on that patio stone.
Suddenly Alex realized what Joe was going to get, and had a feeling in his stomach as though he'd drunk a pint of cold milk all at once. In the few minutes he'd spent with the slug, he'd felt a mix of both repulsion and intrigue.
He'd observed its trail across the concrete and wondered how long it had taken to slither it. He'd probably been slithering there, Alex thought, when the two boys had received the 'Miles around' speech, just a few meters away.
'Had the slug heard the boy's noise?' Alex thought to himself, ' Had the sound frightened him? Do slugs get frightened? Do slugs hear anything at all?',
Alex had no answers to any of these questions, but he did know that he didn't want Joe to shoot the slug with the magnifying glass, which he was sure he'd be returning with imminently. He said a silent prayer in his head without joining his palms or closing his eyes that the sky would stay cloudy, and keep the sun shining through the glass when it arrived. His stomach felt worse as he began to picture the long, fat, slow slug being scorched under the glass, as it would burn holes through it's impressive, disgusting brown hide. He knew it wouldn't just vaporize in an instant like the ants, it was far too big for that. It would sizzle and squirm and coil and writhe in agony. Alex's curiosity to bear witness to that was non existent he was already picturing it vividly enough to know that he didn't want it to happen.
Alex remained on his knees in front of the slug on it's patio slab. The creature had begun to turn slowly to the left, it's tail becoming elongated, while it's brown back continued to shimmer underneath the milky white sky.
The sky was all that Alex could look at, growing increasingly confident that it would remain too overcast to arm the magnifying glass; laser. He considered moving the slug to hide it from Joe, but he didn't dare to touch it's slimy body.
'Could a slug sting like a nettle?' he thought to himself, 'Could it attach to him like super glue?', He didn't know, but it didn't matter the sky was dull and white now like a painted ceiling
overhead.
Alex's gaze was firmly fixed on the sky when Joe appeared silently beside him, having sprinted on tipped toes, brushing into his shoulder as he crouched. Alex looked around to see Joe's outstretched arm holding a tall white plastic container of table salt above the miniature walrus.
'I told mum there was a slug eating the plants and she said to pour salt on it.', Joe said, with his eyes fixed on the narrow waterfall of fine salt as it landed a centimetre from the slug, before being fixed on it's back and gently zigzagging a white line over it's brown body.
Alex didn't say a word as he looked on, both helplessly and curiously at the creature, that had flinched immediately, clenching to two thirds of it's full size in an instant. The two boys' eyes were transfixed on the scene before them, a scene that they had jointly created.
In an instant the slug's body had transformed from a firm, thick, wet looking hide into a fizzing, melting jelly. It's calculated trail, with it's clear indication of a path that lay ahead, now stood interrupted, by a slimy dead-end containing a creature in clear distress.
Alex watched the torturous scene, with a feeling as though someone had damaged something very precious that belonged to him beyond repair, or perhaps just that he'd broken it himself. The bubbling, burning, melting demise of the walrus seemed to take minutes, and Alex found himself wishing for the animal's death to come quickly. He wished he had the magnifying glass and a big ray of sunshine to shoot it between the eyes, but even if he did, by now he couldn't really tell where it's eyes were. What had seconds earlier been a face looking up at him, with eyes and a head and a body, was now little more than a squirming messy shape. Alex thought to himself that if the slug could speak, it would be screaming.
Finally after over two minutes of long silence, Joe spoke up with a crack in his voice,
'Why would Mum tell me to do that?'.