Summary

Chapter 15: Gastropods have very good defense systems, including their shells, camouflage abilities, and various types of slime. Elisabeth is attracted to the cryptic nature of a snail's life, which mirrors the increasingly cryptic nature of her illness and her own life. Being homebound and ill makes her feel as though she has vanished.

Chapter 16: One morning, Elisabeth sees a cluster of eight tiny eggs in the terrarium. Snails are hermaphrodites meaning that they can, if necessary, self-fertilize. But they can also lay eggs long after copulation took place as they can keep a partner's sperm alive for several months or years. Elisabeth describes the elaborate and complex mating rituals of snails which involves three phases and can take up to seven hours. Elisabeth suspects that her snail had mated prior to being removed from the wild and had now determined that...