The Snail

By: Young Person

A story about working towards an exam, being told some important news and then realising what to do when you see a special thing.

The Snail and the Exam

I put so much work into my final performance exam, I wanted the whole thing to be perfect and nothing less than perfect would do. I spent a whole year choosing and rehearsing the music, I picked the songs that meant most to me and hired professional musicians to play with me so that everything would go without a glitch.

But two days before the exam came I found out I was pregnant for the second time. My whole world collapsed around me and I went into shock. I didn't know wether to be thrilled with the thought of another child, or devastated. No food passed my lips and all twenty three times the phone rang that day calls went unanswered to voicemail.

I rang my manager and told him to cancel the recital. No body knew what was wrong and presumed I was having my first attack of stage fright. My boyfriend became concerned that I wasn't answering the phone and he came home to see if I was ok. Hoping it was the doctor coming to tell me he had made a mistake, I answered the door. When I saw him I froze, we'd put a years work into this recital and I couldn't tell him why I was a mess.

I sat on the bed and stared out the window whilst he tried to extract and explanation from me. Inspiration comes in funny ways sometimes. Our flat was on the top floor, five levels above the ground and sliding up my window was a tiny snail. Given that there are no trees close to the building that it could have climbed up, one could only presume the snail and crawled all the way up the building. I watched in fascination as this snail slide right up to the top of my window. Having reached its goal, it curled up and rested in the corner of the window. Now, snails don't move very fast so it must have taken days to get up there, and it had been very windy all day, and for a week before that rain had pelted down hard on our little corner of the world. That little snail had fought very hard to get to the top of the building.

Much like me with my exam, I had fought very hard for a long time to get ready for this performance. I looked at the snail and though how pleased it must be to have reached it's goal. All this time my boyfriend had been talking to me and I had watched the snail completely oblivious to him. I realised that if a snail could climb a building in the pouring rain, I could do an exam whilst being upset. And I picked up my guitar and my car keys and headed for the exam. My boyfriend still thinks it was his magic words that made me do the exam, but it wasn't him. It was a snail.