((Posting for the first time here! Enjoy!))

Thantrus

There’s a tentacle monster in your cooking pot. Of course, you don’t know this; you’re milling through the kitchen, opening the cabinet and sniffing spices to see if they’ll add the element of POW to your soup. POW is elusive – it’s a burst of flavor that surprises and tantalizes the taste buds, adding a layer of interest and sophistica . . .

Okay, you’re trying to cover the smell of the beans. They might taste good, but they have a weird odor, something between old leather and cabbage. It’s fairly stinky, so if you can’t find something to neutralize it no one’s going to eat your culinary breakthrough and that’d be a waste of an hour and a half of prep time. You minced the mushrooms really, really small.

You close the first cabinet and open the second.

Cumin, no. Oregano, no. Why is this so difficult?

Meanwhile, the Thing has grown restless. A long tentacle pushes the pot top to the side, rattling it in the process. You dismiss the sound as steam building inside. “I’ll just turn the heat down,” you think as you open yet a third cabinet. Another five or six spices are sniffed and promptly dismissed as unsatisfactory.

Dang it. You may just have to start from scratch and forsake the beans the second time around.

The tentacles are as thick around as your wrist and have suckers like an octopus. The first of them is all the way out, the second follows, and then a third. Soon all six glorious, five foot long tentacles emerge. They stick to the wall and begin to climb, strong enough to pull the creature’s body weight up, hoisting it so it’s now hanging from the ceiling above you. The lone eyeball in the blob of its head watches you rifling through the kitchen as you try to complete your meal.

Funny enough, it is also planning a meal of a slightly different variety.

Your face.

You spin back towards your pot, hands going to your hips, a frown spreading across your mouth. It’s clear that you’ve made a horrible judgment putting the stinks-alot beans into the mix, and now you’re going to have to wipe the slate clean and start over. You grab the potholders from the peg on the wall and slide them onto your hands, slowly approaching your simmering, odoriferous masterpiece. You’re just about to pick up the pot and dump its contents down the sink drain when the tentacle monster makes his move. He drops the four feet separating him and you, landing onto your head. The thickest tentacles wrap under your chin, making it look like a perverse hat, but then it oozes down over your face and begins to hug. Hard.

You lift your hands, potholders attempting to grab the thing and get it away from your nose and mouth. Your eyes go huge as you wrestle with this horrible beast from the unknown, its suckers pulling at your skin and giving you a zillion hickeys of various sizes. You’re spinning in circles, running into furniture, knocking pots and pans and food askew in your endeavor to free yourself from the thing’s tentacled grasp. It doesn’t seem to want to let go. In fact, it grips your head harder, its little beak mouth chittering and hissing.

You toss your potholders aside and fumble around for something, anything, to use as a weapon. Your hands close around the handle of an enormous wooden spoon, and you use it to slap at the creature’s head. It doesn’t do much other than irritate it, and one of the tentacle tips starts to worm its way into your ear in response. Repulsed, horrified, and somewhat panicked as your air is slowly being shut off, you grab a cooking fork – one of the two pronged ones used to turn roasts over. With little ado you stab the sharp end into the head of the attacking monster. It keens, spasming as you manage to injure it. You stab it again, and again, its tentacles loosening abruptly. The creature is baying now. It starts to detach, frantic to escape your wildly flailing fork arm. You keep striking at it, even when it’s off your face and lumbering over the floor. It’s fast for a creature with no legs – those tentacles can really go, apparently, and it weaves back and forth almost like a snake undulating its body to move.

With a screeching hiss, it flings itself to the wall and starts scampering up, soon too high to reach with your fork.

A minute later it disappears into the rafters above.