One night she was amazed to hear something that she had never heard before: “The sound was of someone very small munching a piece of celery continuously.” Had the snail fed on the envelope? Over the next several nights, her senses sharpened to the movements of her companion.

The next morning she checked to find that the snail was back in its jar, sleeping under a violet leaf, and on an envelope she had propped up against the jar, she noticed a mysterious square hole. That day, having nothing better to do, she watched it crawl about, up the inside of the jar and tentatively, with horns probing, down the other side.

But not having the energy to reject it, she dutifully accepted the gift, and had it placed in a jar on her nightstand. But a snail to Bailey had always seemed like a dull creature nearly beneath notice, and besides, in her condition, the responsibility for keeping it alive seemed overwhelming. Why? Her friend thought the snail might add some diversion to a life lived between antiseptic white walls with none but human visitors, and those sometimes not so many. Bedridden with a complex autoimmune system disorder, she was given a snail from the woods along with a spray of field violets by a well-meaning friend. Likewise, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, a woman in our time, was saved by a snail, if not in body then in spirit. The snails, concerned that he might be overdoing it with his austerities, crawled from near and far, up his bony frame to congregate on his head, making of themselves a cool, slimy cap, perhaps saving him from sunstroke. Legend has it that one day the young ascetic Shakyamuni was meditating shaven-headed under the blazing Indian sun.

Those curlicues on his head are not some stylized coiffure, but rank upon rank of snails. Next time you are around a Buddha statue-any Buddha statue-look closely at what you may have missed before. (190 pp., Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010)

The sound of a wild snail eating