I woke up this morning… and I had turned into a giant bug.
Er. Wrong literary genius. Sorry. (Wince.)
I woke up this morning… and found myself in a strange, liquid environment.
Apparently my cool mist machine had gone wacko in the night, and my entire bedroom was a wonderland of condensation, a fresh-water ocean… complete with seafood.
I caught myself, biting back a note of horror, and replaced the thought of ‘seafood’... with… majestic… aquatic… life-forms.
As in, alive ones. There was an octopus in my room.
I lay very still for several minutes, too confused to think anything further than that. What does one do when one finds an octopus in one’s room? A small octopus, certainly, would warrant concern, examination, perhaps a shriek of revulsion and a dash from the room (if one felt particularly squeamy at the time). But this octopus was no small matter.
There were tentacles everywhere. I was quite lucky in that a small area around my bed was completely free of them, but both windows were dark with reclining limbs and one stray arm lay just between myself and the door. All this I saw with my superb peripheral vision, for I was still too confused and horrified to move.
Would it eat me? It was certainly bigger than me – but I was unsure how much larger a creature had to be before it could eat a smaller creature. Perhaps I might leap from the bed, flying over the splayed tentacle, and hurl myself through the door into the hallway. At least then it would be contained (maybe). And I would be elsewhere. And it was rather damp in my room – perhaps it wouldn’t even want to relocate. I couldn’t imagine an octopus seeking out less-moist surroundings.
And of course, that led me to think of other things. For instance, how had the octopus gotten into my room? The cool mist machine may have turned my part of the house into a cephalopod paradise, but the rest of the house was certainly not in any way similar, nor was the climate outside the house! It was 2 degrees, for Heaven’s sake!
How…. had an octopus…. gotten into my room?
This, I recognized finally, was hardly a constructive thought process, and so I began to plot my escape.
To be continued. (Ha ha ha! Gotcha!)
Discovered via Jameel and thought to be infinitely clever and quite institutable… this is, as you may have guessed, in honor of Lewis Carroll’s birthday.)