A juicy mango is messy business. It leaves a trail of sticky fingers on kitchen cabinets and doorknobs. I once loved a man who could play the zither with his tongue but couldn’t skin a mango.

 

What a waste of tongue. What a waste of man.

 

At a fancy French bistro, my man orders escargots for our table. Where else does anyone really ever order escargots except in a fancy restaurant? Word so palatable when it slimes down your throat. It’s always the fancy stuff that runs so slick. Chardonnay. Parsnip puree. Crème brûlée. We fumble with snail tongs the way we fumble with chopsticks the way we fumble with fingers. Delicate tongs fiddle with the two-pronged fork and the shell gives way almost too easily. Everything could be a kind of skill, but we are stubborn as we are messy, misplaced in this French restaurant with our loud clank of wine glasses, our thrift store laughter, our Louis Vuitton dupes––cocktail but not quite couture.

Before leaving, he pockets the tongs while I sneak a shell into the space between my boobs, snail juice and parsley butter dripping down our fingers. This will all be important for what’s to come, though we don’t know that yet.

 

At midnight, I slip out from under his arm and reach for the clothes pooled at the side of our bed until I feel inside my bra. This escargot exoskeleton. This stolen treasure in my palm. I think this could be good. I think home. I position its mouth facing our bed and I climb in knee first like a child in a hammock, looking back only briefly at my man’s sleeping face tilted sideways. I think mine and mean it.

 

Of course, there’s no luring me out after that. My man is no skillful man. He hears me when he holds the shell to his ear hoping for the ocean, finding only my light snoring. He takes me from room to room, holding me toward the light. I’m no conch promise, only a small fractal of the sea.

 

We settle into our new life almost too easily. Three times a day he feeds me mango pulp off the tip of his finger, stolen tongs positioned perfectly to hold me in place. I’m always three parts science experiment in his eyes. From the inside, I see traces of me diminish from the house – picture frames, coat racks, the dip on my side of the couch.

 

This goes on for months until he starts to forget the sound of my voice. No matter how hard he tries to shove his ear into my escargot home, he finds nothing familiar. It’s almost translucent, the way kindness weeps through the glow in his eyes. The smaller I get, the more he wants to web me into the mangled membrane remnants stuck to his skin like Mod Podge. That’s the thing about memory: it’s sticky like a juicy mango until it isn’t. He forgets me everywhere, hopelessly beeping his car keys for a sign. I go days without a drop of juice, growing quiet in my disappointed hunger.

 

Every day when he leaves, I lick the doorknobs clean.