During my first year at the University of Cape Town, I studied Botany and Zoology—a curriculum that required a fairly high tolerance for the internal workings of the animal kingdom. I remember one particularly humid afternoon in the lab; the entire class was hunched over workstations, each of us staring down a snail soaking in preserving liquid.
The task was daunting: we were expected to dissect and draw the snail's reproductive organs.
It was an exercise in extreme patience. To the naked eye, a snail is a simple creature, but once you get under the shell, it’s a labyrinth. It felt like we were untangling miles of incredibly fine, intricate tubing. The atmosphere in the lab was thick with the smell of formaldehyde and the sound of forty students holding their breath.
My classmate, Mark, was not having a good day. Mark didn't enjoy the clinical nature of dissection at the best of times, and the gastropod's "intricate tubing" was pushing him to the edge of his sanity. I could see the frustration radiating off him—the white knuckles, the furrowed brow, the mounting, silent rage.
Suddenly, the silence of the lab was shattered.
"Fuck this!" Mark roared.
Before anyone could react, he brought his fist down with the force of a sledgehammer, squarely onto his specimen. The snail didn't just break; it exploded into a thousand tiny, preserved fragments across his desk.
Without a second glance at the wreckage, Mark stood up, shouldered his bag, and looked straight at the professor. "Prof," he said, his voice trembling with a strange mix of fury and liberation, "give me zero for this. I just don't care right now."
He turned and walked out of the lab, leaving the rest of us sitting in stunned silence, still clutching our scalpels and trying to find the beginning of a mile of tubing.
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