Anthropomorphizing takes us on a kind of shortcut to compassion. "You are different from me," we say to slug, to bug, "but I am trying to appreciate what it's like to be you." Watching our slimy friend — or maybe by watching Ben watch him — I start to understand this. Because much to Ben's delight, Sluggy begins a slow and erratic performance of the alphabet. "He's a J!" Ben cries from the front step. "Wait — now he's a C! I want him to do a B, of course, but I think he's probably not able to."

The morning passes happily until it's time for an outing. Ben and I consult briefly about our having to desert the slug. It's a warm day but not terribly hot, and we decide to leave Sluggy with a leaf full of applesauce and to put him in the shade. Ben worries a little about this, and I reassure him. "You'll let him go later," I say. "But I'm sure he'll be fine for a couple of hours." In the made-for-TV drama version of this prediction, you'd hear my words repeated in a ghostly way —". . . fine for a couple of hours . . . for a couple of hours . . . a couple of hours . . ." — that would cue you to its gloomy mistakenness. When we return from our outing, Ben finds Sluggy curled up beneath the shady leaf: awfully small, awfully brown, and awfully dead.