The Edible Variety

By Joseph Torchia

Julia was a Roman snail, the edible variety, the kind you find in French restaurants. Or in the back yard, stuck to the undersides of calla lily leaves, which she had a passion for. Those thick, green, pointed clustered California calla lily leaves were Julia's aphrodisiac. They were also her downfall. They sent her stickily pursuing every snail in sight -- or night -- be it male or female, straight or...

Or be it Julia, who loved herself when no one else was available.

For Julia, like every other gastropod in her garden, was an hermaphrodite. That is to say, she had a complete set of both male and female genitalia. That is to say, with a stretch of her imagination Julia could turn that calla lily leaf into a veritable Roman bacchanalia -- all by herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Torchia
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005388119

Joseph Torchia

Joseph Torchia (December 15, 1946 – April 22, 1996) was an American author and photographer. In the late 1970s he also worked as a reporter for The Palm Beach, The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner.Torchia was born in Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1964 (Johnsonburg High School). After his studies at the University of Florida (1968) he spent two years in the Peace Corps (1968–1970). After having left journalism, Torchia owned a photography studio during the last 15 years of his life.---I am Erika Torchia, Joseph's niece, and responsible for the digital republishing of his written works.

Book preview

ONE

Julia was a Roman snail, the edible variety, the kind you find in French restaurants. Or in the back yard, stuck to the undersides of calla lily leaves, which she had a passion for. Those thick, green, pointed, clustered California calla lily leaves were Julia's aphrodisiac. They were also her downfall. They sent her stickily pursuing every snail in sight -- or night -- be it male or female, straight or...

Or be it Julia, who loved herself when no one else was available.

For Julia, like every other gastropod in her garden, was an hermaphrodite. That is to say, she had a complete set of both male and female genitalia. That is to say, with a stretch of her imagination Julia could turn that calla lily leaf into a veritable Roman bacchanalia -- all by herself.

Or, himself.

However you looked at it, one thing was certain: Julia, unlike her unlucky cousins now smothered in garlic, was sexually intoxicated by her spiculum amoris. The spiculum amoris, according to Hy Freedman in his book Sex Link: The Three-Billion-Year-Old Urge and What the Animals Do About It, which Julia particularly enjoyed, is a chalky, spear-like substance released during a snail's sexual intercourse. More commonly called a love dart, this spiculum amoris pierces the other snail, wounding it, causing it to react with pain and, notes Freedman, "with a renewed upsurge of passion as it reciprocates with its own love dart.

Sadomasochism, or pain-in-pleasure, read Julia, apparently is a sexual expression that some snails have in common with some humans. But this so-called love dart, insists the author, is much more than a sex toy. It also determines if both snails are of the same species and therefore sexually compatible -- which is especially useful at night, since several species shared Julia's lunar lust for calla lily leaves.

But Julia didn't care what manner of snail she stumbled upon. No species was safe. She lusted after mud snails and searched the birdbath for water snails. One deserted day she desperately attacked an earthworm. She didn't care what it was, where it was. When she was high on California calla lily leaves even the dragonflies kept their distance.

Poor Julia. She was out of control. She wasn't even safe from herself. One day, one side of her body raped the other. Two days later it happened again.

Night after night, leaf after leaf, Julia was devoured by her sex.

Both of them.

* * *

Julia had another problem. Books. She lusted after words as if they were alive. In November, when most snails went into hibernation, Julia headed straight for the public library. There was something about the musty smell of old books that excited her almost as much as the damp undersides of calla lily leaves. One winter she devoured everything she could find on arthopods, primarily insects. Another winter it was the cephalopods, with a special emphasis on the octopus -- which uses one of its eight arms, not a penis, for sexual intercourse. One particularly rainy winter she branched off into the selachians, such as sharks, which somehow led to a study of the development of the penis -- an organ that took an estimated one hundred million years to evolve. And which, Julia instantly decided, was well worth the wait.

Every year Julia chose a new topic, a new animal -- something that would help her to better understand the passion that exploded on hot summer nights. She learned, for example, that earthworms are bisexual and elephants masturbate with their trunks. But when she found out that a cockroach has several penises and 35,000 different mating techniques, she got so horny that she fucked herself right there, on page 429 of Volume Two of a four-part study of invertebrates, and she made a mental note to meet a male cockroach at the first whiff of spring.

Needless to say, Julia was fascinated to find out that it is the male, not the female, sea horse that gets pregnant. And she couldn't believe it when she read that a female sage grouse has precisely one hundred sexual encounters a year -- all on the same night. And the more she studied the birds and the bees and the hornets and the fleas, the more Julia realized her own sexual appetite wasn't nearly as extravagant as she first suspected.

But books are one thing and real life another. And no sooner did the first showers of April hit than Julia headed straight back to the garden just in time to meet her brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends coming out of hibernation and heading directly for the calla lily leaves. For it is no secret that when a snail comes out of hibernation (or out of the library) the first thing on its mind is food. And the second thing on its mind is sex. And the third thing on its mind is food. And the fourth thing on its mind is sex. And that's pretty much all that most snails, and some humans, think about.

But one winter -- Julia called it the winter of her discontent -- one winter she went to the public library, parked herself under

841.74 MOLLUSKS,

and read every book on nine shelves. That was the winter she learned, among other things, that there are some 30,000 known species of snails in the world and 180 of them are edible varieties. Her imagination instantly went wild with sexual possibilities, and she made up her mind immediately, you might even say instinctively, to systematically fuck and/or get fucked by as many species as possible.

By Christmas she was so excited at this prospect that her genitals, both male and female, were swelling and hurting from anticipation. And by the time the first April showers arrived she literally had to drag herself back to the garden, determined to unload her anxiety on the first living creature that crossed her path. It was probably the first time in zoological history that a frog was molested by a snail.

But both Julia and the frog were determined that it wouldn't be the last.

* * *

One winter she stumbled into the Psychology Department by mistake. She was looking for Philosophy, but took a wrong turn at the bust of Shakespeare.

If a man's head is turned on, she read that winter, his penis follows naturally. Sexual dysfunction is the result of performance anxiety, which can occur only in the brain -- which sent Julia skidding to a halt.

What the hell was this guy talking about? No snail she knew had a problem getting it up. If anything they had nonperformance anxiety -- an acute anxiety at the very thought of not getting laid, one way or another.

Now that was something worth worrying about.

These humans, she said out loud to herself, shaking her head at the words on the page before her. "If it isn't performance anxiety, it's penis envy...

If they aren't worrying about what they don't have, they're going limp over what they do!

For Julia there was no such thing as going limp. And she gave new meaning to the term giving head. Like most snails, she had her sex organs on her face.

The right side, to be exact.

Just above a mouth that contained one large upper tooth and fourteen thousand microscopic lower teeth that are used to chop, not chew, the tender young shoots of those pointed, perfect calla lily leaves.

Yes, Julia had a wonderful smile. But she was lousy at fellatio.

Maybe that's why she was so preoccupied with the tiny sex pocket on the side of her face -- that peculiar little pocket that, when titillated, turned itself inside out and opened like a flower, revealing not stamen and pistil but penis and vagina: all in one package. All part of this moist little mollusk named Julia, an edible variety. The kind you find on calla lily leaves.

Especially when the moon was whole.

* * *

Take the night the full moon was in Scorpio and Julia was juicy as ever. She had just left the library and made her way into the busiest April night the garden had ever seen. Every leaf was crawling, every stem was sticky. Slugs were doing it on the begonias and bugs were doing it on the bricks and worms were doing it in the dirt and Julia was wet with ecstasy. Everywhere she turned, everywhere she looked some species was doing it -- beneath the ferns, on the backs of lawn furniture, at the base of the budding plum tree, even on the rusty blades of a broken- down old lawnmower. It was as if that potent moon were pulling at every perversion, tugging at every excitement, turning that sedate garden into a tidal wave of sexual frenzy.

Her spiculum amoris was itching. Her genital orifice began twitching.

Her eye tentacles shot up like periscopes and scanned the garden -- taking in every moan, cry, and quiver. And the unmistakable shiver of a snail just struck by a love dart.

It had been a good five months since she had made love to anything but herself. She had spent the entire winter in Zoology, studying how female rats perform