The Great Lettuce Heist

Slimy’s ambition far exceeded his speed, or his girth. His dream was to cross the unforgiving expanse of Mrs. Higgins’s back garden to reach The Sacred Head of Romaine, a prize of such size and crispness it was practically a monument.

The year was 1968, the height of summer, and Slimy had a plan. He wasn’t going to crawl. Crawing was for amateurs.

He was going to surf.

His partner in crime was Pip, a beetle whose main function in life was complaining.

“I still don’t understand why we’re doing this during the hottest part of the day,” Pip muttered, clinging precariously to Slimy’s shell-less back.

“Silence, Pip!” Slimy yelled, his eyestalks twitching with maniacal focus. “The sun bakes my trail! It creates a slick, semi-solid layer of… of pure velocity!”

In reality, the heat was just evaporating the water in his mucus, leaving behind a sticky, awful film.

Slimy pushed off from the edge of the shed, aiming for the first patch of damp shade fifty feet away. Immediately, his undercarriage seized up. He wasn’t sliding; he was sticking. Every micro-millimeter of progress was achieved through pure, agonizing abdominal contraction, a motion less like surfing and more like peeling a sticker off a varnished tabletop.

“Velocity, you said,” Pip wheezed, adjusting his tiny sunglasses. “I believe the current rate of travel is approximately one Planck length per fortnight.”

Slimy ignored him. “I just need a better… launch!”

With a burst of desperation, Slimy secreted a volume of mucus that, had it been liquid, would have drowned Pip. The result was not speed, but a magnificent, sticky dome that enveloped them both. They slid three inches, then stopped dead, firmly glued to the concrete path.

The Unlikely Rescue

Just then, Kevin, a nine-year-old boy and resident Terror of the garden, came skipping out the back door, singing a song about “Groovy, Groovy Caterpillars.” Kevin was known for two things: an unnerving love of brightly coloured wellington boots, and an innate talent for accidentally stepping on invertebrates.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Pip whispered, knowing their sticky situation meant a lack of escape options.

As Kevin’s neon green boot descended toward their mucus-prison, Slimy had a flash of inspiration. The glue!

He expanded the sticky dome, coating the bottom of the approaching boot just before impact. Kevin’s foot landed, missed Slimy by a hair, and then… stuck.

Kevin lifted his foot, and the entire surface layer of the concrete path, along with Slimy and Pip, came up with it. Slimy found himself traveling higher and faster than he ever had, clinging to the sole of the enormous boot.

“We’re airborne, Pip!” Slimy cried out, ecstatic. “We’re surfing the very winds of fate!”

“We are adhered to the sole of a rapidly moving, oversized rubber shoe!” Pip screamed back.

Kevin, oblivious, took a giant, stomping step right over the prize.

THWUMP!

Slimy, Pip, and the sticky patch of concrete landed squarely on top of The Sacred Head of Romaine.

The Victory

The impact shattered the lettuce, but left Slimy and Pip relatively unscathed. The surrounding slugs, who had spent the morning methodically nibbling the lower leaves, looked up in astonished, mucous-covered silence.

Slimy, covered in concrete dust and Romaine flakes, raised his eyestalks in triumph.

“See, Pip? Pure velocity!”

Pip merely shook his head, scraped himself off the sticky wreckage, and began eating the debris.

“Just call me King Slimy from now on,” Slimy declared.

“I’ll stick with Slimy,” Pip mumbled around a mouthful of lettuce, “but I’ll grant you this: you are the only slug in the county who has ever been rescued by his own failed adhesive technology.”

And that was the story of how Slimy, through utter incompetence and a staggering quantity of glue, successfully completed the greatest lettuce heist in garden history. Though, for the rest of his life, he was forced to peel himself off various surfaces using his tail.