snail slime gold mine
It’s midnight thirty and this is the phrase I have stuck in my head, keeping me awake. Snail slime gold mine. Snail slime gold mine. It’s not uncommon for me to hear whole phrases in my head, usually out of the crystal blue. Like, I’ll be sitting down to pee and suddenly it’ll be, “Sally never did learn how to tango”, which is weird, but passing. Other times it’s an untethered fragment, “Caution, radioactive decay”. Maybe these were the last words spoken in a dream just before I woke up or something I overheard a stranger yell across the gare in Montpellier 17 years ago. I usually can’t pin down a source; most times the phrases are as devoid of context as they are of content. I can try to match the phrase to a memory, but that mutates them until the words stop meaning things in any order and then they disappear. Once I saw a lucid image of a large, ugly fish, viewed in the sagittal plane. I needed to know why he appeared to me in this way, when I almost never see pictures in my mind. Before swimming back into the deeper waters of my subconscious, slowly, slowly the beast turned to face me, and parting his fishy lips, bubbled only, “Mackerel”.
