Subterranean Beefworks

Mackes was a small boy who was facinated by biology. Every afternoon on the long walk home from school, little Mackes would stare with wonderment at the leaves, rocks, birds, trees, and lizards. He wondered what they were made of, and if he was perhaps made of the same material. With eyes wide, he drank in the world around him with great thirst, not for trivial knowledge or to even to celebrate the process of learning. Little Mackes just enjoyed being in the world he lived in.

One day on the walk home from school, Mackes paused by a stream that flowed along the trodden dirt path which lead to his house. Kneeling at its soggy, musky banks, he peered into the briskly trickling water to look for his reflection, but he could not find it. Adjusting his eyes, he peered at the muddy silt inches below the surface. "Why doesn't the dirt move?" he thought to himself. His finger tips curious, he dipped them into the silt, watching as strands of particulate came to life at the whim of his touch.

"Best be washin' your hands a'fore you do any eatin'," said a voice from across the stream. It was rough and bubbly, as though its owner was in the middle of a productive coughing spell. "Dunno what's in these streams." Mackes, startled, looked up to see a man kneeling on the opposite bank. He was clad from head to toe with an outfit that looked like a number of hobo's satchels had been sewn together into one great, filthy tapestry, his knees darkened from having recently knelt in soily moisture. With long gnarled fingers dangling in the stream, he locked a pair of weathered eyes with the young, startled Mackes. There they sat, the man like a bullfrog, and Mackes waiting for some outside force to carry the encounter someplace other than this durable silence. Effortless patience fell over the two. Mackes, young and yet unladen with social grace, let himself be fascinated by this man. He explored the man's face as he would a leaf or a rock, transfixed with the wonderment of something he did not understand. The corners of his eyes were the most interesting. Though bunched up like dried seaweed, they moved like the skin above a sleeping cat's ribs. One even seemed to have a different personality than the other, the left coming across as the calming equilizer to the right's almost disconcerting wileyness.

The man then produced something from a pouch at his thigh. The bag made stoney, crackling sounds as he rummaged through it, its contents packed closely banged their hard surfaces together until his hand finally emerged once more, now convered in a snotty sheen of stringy gel.

"Snails," he said frankly. Mackes just watched further, as he would a creature crawling over something. The man stood suddenly and repeated. "Snails."