Lio by Mark Tatulli for July 12, 2017

When I was a kid, on a hot summer day when we were too involved in outdoor play to go inside for a sip of water, any of us kids would take a drink from the garden hose. We were “fastidious” in that we wouldn’t touch the hose with our lips, but drank from the stream, water fountain style, unscrewing the nozzle to get a smooth water flow. Once, when someone had failed to replace the nozzle the previous day, my brother picked up the hose, turned on the faucet, and was a split second from drinking from the stream when half a dozen large garden slugs came shooting out of the hose… where they’d taken refuge in the cool, wet dark when the sun came up that morning. Traumatizing horror ensued. We were sufficiently spooked by the weird creatures in the haunted hose to never drink from it again.