Your Biggest Fear
It’s Day 20 of the #Blogtober14 Challenge with The Daily Tay and Helene in Between! Here is Mary with today’s post of “Your biggest fear.”
The Legend of the Octo-Optae
Long ago, when the world was sludge and everything in it mere sludge creatures, a powerful alien race dropped suddenly from the skies to inhabit every corner of the earth. Hither and yon they would crawl on their horrifying legs, creeping into corners, cupboards, under benches and dropping suddenly from above. And they had eight eyes and eight legs and their form was fierce and terrifying. They were the Octo-Optae.
These horrifying (and evil, way way evil) beasts proceeded to carry out their horrifying (and way evil) plan to conquer humanity by scaring the beejeesus out of them at every turn. Upon seeing a young girl descending innocently into the basement of her childhood home, they converged and attacked, surrounding her and trapping her in the laundry room.
“Beware, beware!” shrieked the young girl’s parental units, “In the basement, the Octo-Optae are many and they will EAT YOU UP and destroy you!”
This same girl they ambushed twice in the doorway of her home. Spreading a cloud of themselves over the doorway and crawling over every part of her body when she unwittingly walked through the cloud. She screamed and tore off her clothes and charged upstairs to the shower, but lo, showers are one of the Octo-Optae’s strongholds and they did not perish.
The young girl was stalked and plagued for years by these evil creatures from outer space. Wisps and tendrils of web found their way into her face, they would present themselves suddenly at a moment of weakness and take great delight in her terror. When she accepted a position working for a lakeside theatre, she had to walk through a tunnel under the highway and the Octo-Optae were many strong there. Big, chunky jumpers, lurking about in the shadows and great giant webs streaming down the cement walls from the caged light fixtures. They could smell her fear, though they had no noses.
When the young girl grew up, she found that the things with too many eyes were not so terrible and the horrifying legs were just legs.
And she found, at last, that when she accepted that all living things were part of the world she lived in, that there was room enough for the Octo-Optaes too.
