Flash fiction by A.A. Loria

A Snapping Turtle in the Road

The road is no place for a snapping turtle. This hard stretch of grey that thunders with the sound of shining creatures beyond her understanding is unnatural to her. But the road is an obstacle between her and where she needs to go to lay her eggs, so journey across it she must.

But she’s come to a stop.

She was almost halfway across, when suddenly, one of its flashing creatures roared past her. She could feel the heat of it sting against her nose, missing her by a step. She tucked her head back into the safety of her shell, trembling, as it roared away.

It’s here that she remains frozen, fearing the appearance of another. She can hear its oncoming roar, fast approaching. She braces for impact, even as she hopes it will see her as uninteresting and leave her unharmed.

The ground beneath her feet trembles. Closer and closer the roaring comes, until just as suddenly as it started, it stops. 

Then, a slam. 

Two legs step into her field of vision, and she recognizes the shape of these legs; long and bare-skinned, ending in two bulky feet. When the animal crouches down, showing her its odd, flat face, it confirms what she’s looking at.

A human. 

Her head surges forward suddenly. Sharp, powerful jaws open wide and snap shut hard enough to make a loud crack. She doesn’t succeed in biting the human, but it still tumbles backwards with a cry of alarm, falling on its hindquarters. Though she can’t reach it, she snaps at it again. A warning; keep away, or she’ll bite.

Undeterred, the human gets up again. A loud screeching suddenly assaults the snapping turtle’s senses, and she shrinks back into her shell once more, fearing another monster. A different sound joins the screeching, more loud calling, and this she recognizes as the cries of the human. It moves out of her field of vision, leaving her alone once again. 

Suddenly, something grabs the back of her shell. Her head darts back out, and she whips her neck back to snap viciously at whatever has caught her, but she can’t reach. 

She sees it only briefly; the human is holding onto the back of her shell. She tries to gouge with her hind claws, but the human’s hands press on her limbs, keeping them immobile. She’s lifted off the road and into the air. She continues to thrash her neck about, hissing furiously. 

The human moves loudly, each footstep jostling her as it carries her across the road. She refuses to be pliant in these strange hands, she won’t let the human do what it will with her without a fight.

It could do anything. It could drop her from this great height. It could crush her beneath a heavy foot. It could kill her in so many ways, and make her into a meal, like she would with a slippery frog. She is powerless against the human, a feeling she is not used to. She keeps trying to bite, keeps trying to claw.

But the human doesn’t do any of those things. Instead, it carries her some distance away from the road. It stops its thunderous walking and lowers her, gently, to the ground.

The ground that meets her feet is soft. It’s soil, loose and sandy, that gives beneath her weight until she sinks into it. The cushioned hands release her. 

She hears the footsteps again, shaking the dirt around her, until they fade away. The human is gone as quickly as it arrived, retreating back to wherever it came from. 

She doesn’t move immediately. Perhaps out of caution, or perhaps out of contemplation. Here she sits in the dry dirt, perfect for egg-laying, and she understands that this happened because the human helped her.

The snapping turtle can’t understand the human’s actions. All she can understand is that a human did not harm her, nor did it try to eat her. It seemingly risked its own life against those road monsters, just so it could bring her to this place of safety, where she could lay her eggs.

She doesn’t understand why. She can’t understand why. 

The snapping turtle has no concept of kindness. She can’t comprehend the tenderness of the human’s act towards her. But as her claws dig into the soft earth, preparing it to receive her eggs, she continues to think about her encounter with the human. 

She’ll think about it for a long time. Her memory is long, it will carry on for many egg-laying seasons. And with every clutch she lays, she will remember the human that made them all possible. The human that braved monsters, and carried her away from them. 

What an incomprehensible animal a human is. To be so large, so powerful, so fierce as to shout at monsters, while at the same time having such gentle hands, to rescue a snapping turtle even though it had nothing to gain from doing so.

How delightfully strange.