A little something I wrote today…
The following incident happened last night.
(Probably not a recommended read for people who don’t like/are huge fans of slugs…)
The Slugfork Portal
There’s a portal which sporadically appears in our kitchen. A rather item-specific, sporadic portal. Slugs, of all sizes, sometimes materialise in the early hours of the morning and seemingly forks, of all types, dematerialise. The fork to slug ratio is probably around 1:33. I haven’t kept detailed figures.
I’ve never seen the portal ‘in action’ and I’m not sure of its exact location but I am convinced of its existence. Luckily the slugs do not directly take the place of the forks and instead opt for the surfaces, the sink or, more often than not, the floor.
Last night I had my first experience of mistakenly going into the kitchen without my glasses on at around 2am to fetch a mug of water before bed and having the misfortune to ‘pop open’ a slug with the base of my left foot. The slug had been squelching to freedom on the floor just by the cupboard under the sink. It had almost reached the back door, portal to our garden…
I think I am the last of the house’s current inhabitants to experience this joy. Having a black and white tiled floor adds to the danger levels. Luckily (for me at least) my foot was slightly protected by a rather bright cyan coloured tight. The juice still managed to permeate the membrane however and stick to my foot, absorbing into my skin.
I stood in the kitchen, knackered from a long day at work, followed by a night out and a medium length walk home, pretty disgusted by what had just happened and, indeed, the seeping slug attached to the under side of the left foot of my tights, which I was holding as at much of a distance as I could by pulling the tight away with my hand. I stared at it with a distinct grimace underscored by blank tiredness.
After removing the still slightly wiggling corpse with a piece of extra absorbent kitchen roll and (I regret) unceremoniously dumping it in our kitchen bin, I awkwardly removed my cyan tights so that the sullied foot of them did not once again touch my own and then ran the necessary part of them under the tap. I then cleansed the sole of my foot and wiped away the slug death residue on the floor next to a much smaller slug, still squelching its way to freedom, triumphantly unperturbed by the sudden slaughter of its comrade in squelch which had just occurred at a worryingly close distance to itself only moments before… all the while dodging another slug which was dangerously close to one of the camouflaging black floor tiles. Finally I filled a mug up with water and shuffled off into my room, trying to stop replaying the slug death sensation in my head. Euck.
This morning I have been pondering the reason for the slugfork portal. Where does it lead? What needs to be in place for it to open? Is someone in 1944 enjoying the extra forks that keep appearing in their kitchen? Are the slugs from a distant galaxy or another dimension? Part of me wishes that the portal worked the other way around, but that would then possibly entail more slugs in our kitchen and a bleeding fork-pierced foot in the early hours of the morning rather than a slime covered one.
I’m not sure that they have forks in distant galaxies but I would sure as hell like to find out. In the meantime, we probably need to buy some more forks.