Invasion of the Slime Monsters
This was something I posted on Squidoo for yet another contest, this one about a “memorable” photo you took. I suppose it says something about me that when I read the rules I knew exactly what I was going to use…
Not the average photo
Prologue to a massacre
“She seemed like such a nice lady,” the neighbors said. “Quiet. Kept to herself…”
The Autopsy Results
“Murder,” she said.
“I told you- Mercury retrograde,” my astrology-minded friend said. “It makes everything technological go haywire. I told you to watch out, didn’t I?”“How am I supposed to watch out for SLUGS, Jen? Besides, they are NOT high-tech! They are foul little demons that are going to cost me a LOT of money!”It was definitely time to panic. When I’d cracked the computer case to install the new hard drive I’d been greeted with slick silver slime trails inside the machine… over the motherboard, the fan, the sound and graphics cards- everywhere. The computer remained completely unresponsive, and things did not look hopeful.Like any concerned parent, I bundled the sick patient into the car and took it to the ER- in this case a neighborhood repair shop, where I proceeded to give the guys a huge belly laugh. They’d never seen anything quite like it.“When they took the board out, the little nasty dried up corpse fell out,” I told her, the image burned into my mind. “It was vile.”The slug had apparently come in under the office side door and decided to explore the first thing it came across- my computer tower. It slithered up inside the vent and got stuck, smootching across everything in circles until its slime short circuited the machine, frying itself in the process. It turns out – who knew?- slug trails are electrically conducive, so everything was wiped out in one fell swoop.As I described the murder, I went from anxious to angry.
And started to plan revenge.
It was Mrs. Peacock in the garden with the poison…
It was kinda like this…
Sorta.
The next thing you see will be…memorable.
And that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Aftermath
In the morning I went outside to see what I hath wrought.
Apparently my house was club-med for slugs! Where did they all COME from? The bait must’ve called them from miles around because they couldn’t have all been hiding out nearby…could they?
I decided I was going to ignore the killing field until my husband came home from his business trip the following day. He could clean up the battlefield. After all, hadn’t I done the hard work? Hadn’t I suffered enough?
No, apparently not, because as the day heated up the smell was enough to knock your shoes off at thirty paces. I had to get a shovel and get to work. I’d counted 250 dead bodies before deciding I just didn’t want to know.
I had thought the one dried dead slug was revolting? So naive. Hundreds of semi-liquified slugs? Now that redefined vile.
As I dropped the garbage bag in the bin with a shudder, a worrisome thought occurred. They’d sent a single slug in to scout. I’d retaliated with brutal efficiency. What if- please God, no- what if they escalated? What if they launched a full-scale invasion? “Perhaps,” I thought, “a protective salt circle around the bed tonight might be a good idea.”
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So here we are, finally at the picture that inspired the contest lens. Hope you got a laugh!
