Enrico and the Big Apple

 

-1-

Enrico was a common garden snail. He spent his long, dull days crawling up and down a small garden path. He was very VERY bored.

Ever since Enrico was little, he had wanted, more than anything, to visit New York. To Enrico, New York was more magical than Alton Towers, Hogwarts and Disneyland rolled into one.

He wanted to crawl to the top of the Statue of Liberty and drink huge cups of ‘Joe’ in cafes, like the nice people in Friends off the telly. It bothered him not a jot that he didn’t know what ‘Joe’ was.

His friends thought that he had gone bananas, but Enrico knew better.

He would tell them, ‘I simply love New York! I want to live under a shrub in Central Park and eat bagels for breakfast and hot dogs for lunch and cheesecake for tea and meet the zoo animals from Madagascar the movie, especially the giraffe as he sounds like Ross from Friends. I’d also like to have a cold beer with Michael Bublé as he seems like a real man’s man.’

‘Bublé is Canadian you asshole, said Claude the Spider.

Enrico didn’t believe him.

At night, Enrico curled up in his shell, the walls of which were decorated with posters of Woody Allen movies. He would screw up his eyes very tight and plot complicated plans to get him from his boring garden to the place so nice they named it twice.

The problem was, his plans were terrible. The best one involved a forged pilots license and was far fetched at best. He didn’t even have a valid passport and the village Post Office was a four-day crawl AT LEAST.

Enrico felt very sad. Perhaps he would never reach New York?

-2-

One breezy Autumn day, Enrico noticed a poster pinned to the garden tree. He read it carefully, twice, his tie flapping in the wind.

 

-----------------------------------

 

EXTRAS WANTED

Top New York director wants authentic insects to appear in his brand new blockbuster movie, to be set and filmed entirely in New York. Guaranteed Oscars etc. Mega bucks.

Auditions begin tomorrow at 11.00 am in

the ALDI car park.

(Snails welcome)

Respect.

 

--------------------------------

 

‘Man alive!’ Enrico mumbled. ‘I’d buy that for a dollar!’

-3-

Enrico stared at the poster for some time, picturing himself on a New York sidewalk, acting alongside Robert de Niro and Mathew Broderick and 50 Cent in a Brooklyn flat cap, being all gangster and menacing.

He just knew that he would look amazing in one of those Al Capone hats. Then he worried. How on earth would he hold a gun? And would artificial facial hair stick to his face?

He hoped that the film would be a screwball comedy or romantic epic, rather than a crime caper or mismatched cop partnership action flick.

As he was thinking that very thought, he felt a shadow fall over him. Very slowly, he turned around. Some two or three minutes later he completed the maneuver and found himself face to face with a black paw.