I was reading this (thank you, I., for the link) (and I swear I am gonna e-mail you back really, really soon) and it reminded me of that one insanely hot day last summer in Singapore, when Matthew and CC and I went to the local public swimming hole for a chill-out, and, because it was insanely hot and because it was the weekend, there were parents and kids everywhere, and I was swimming from one end of the pool to the other when I noticed a goodly sized brown lump on the white-tiled bottom, so I freestyled back to Matthew and CC and said, “I think there’s some poo over there,” I swear this is a true story, and Matthew swam over in that direction, then came back and said: “I fanned around it to see, and waves of brown emanated from it and came toward me, so, yes, I think it’s poo,” so of course we screamed and screamed and then very quickly swam to the farthest away end of the pool, where we hung out, shuddering, and laughing nervously. Still, it never occurred to us that we should get out.

Oh, yuck, and now I remember that just, like, three hours ago CC was preparing dinner and she peeled off the outer leaf of the head of cabbage to reveal two brown slugs hanging out all quiet-like. Really, I’m not generally queasy about bugs—although I am not about to crush a cockroach with my shoe the way my mum will—but when one of the slugs began to move about, and then when his little antenna things sluggily retracted into his little sluggy head, I started clawing at the wall. Then CC made me carry the slugs, on the leaf, to the patch of earth in the flowerbox outside. I cleared a straight path to the door and then—my arm stretched out as far as possible—hopped across the living room, emitting yeeps: “Yeep. Yeep. Yeep.”

Later, from across the room, I looked out the glass panels into the rain and the dark, and thought I saw the slug at the door, now grown human-sized, wearing sunglasses and boardshorts. He wanted in.