The slug was really working. Its tongue stuck sideways out of its mouth. It was corn- and honey-hued and almost muscled. A tree had doffed a leaf upon its back, and the tree was a maple.

My friend was marrying. Someone like his mother, no surprise. He was not like the slug in that he was not scared, not by the lugging, not by the strain it took to haul himself behind the dumpster fire that was his bride-mother.

The slug did not know how to cross water.

In a very real sense, it did not possess knowledge.

It reached the narrowest of brooks—a thumb-wide rivulet—and it shrank backward, one of two directions a slug will move instinctively.

A still slug is a dead one.

My friend grew very still in the window light boring through the purple-white-green stained glass by the altar, and he was anchored there I don't know how long.