hungry cave monster

2024-01-06

We were hanging out in a gymnasium at the basketball court, and the ref was dressed up as santa claus and doing backflips all the way across the court whenever he called a foul. I looked him up, and his imdb profile was huge. He must have been in hundreds and hundreds of movies. But then come to find out, it was mostly because every game and every event that happened in the gym was filmed by a film crew and released as some kind of low budget reality sports movie. So those numbers were kind of artificially high.

One of the movies though was about a kid and his friends who fall down a well into a deep dark cavern and have to try to find their way back out. My friends and I became the kids in the movie. And the guy, the ref, who was the kid, and who was also me, had some kind of weird authority in this group of kids. He was the leader, and the other kids were so dependent on him that there was almost a prisoner / captor relationship between them. I started building a spiral staircase of stone brick stairs while the other kids watched helplessly.

While I worked, I could hear the moaning and groaning of something terrible nearby in the surrounding caves. I worked carefully in anticipation. So when the monster appeared, I was sure to be by myself up on the column of stairs, out of reach. I pulled the ladder up behind me, leaving the other kids down below.

The monster was a huge shaggy furry thing. It walked hunched over on two legs and had long forearms and long clawed hands. Its face was obscured, mostly covered with long fur. But it had a massive protruding jaw that looked capable of snapping bone in a single bite. It shuffled forward across the cave floor, moaning plaintively. And when it got to the kids, it snatched one up in its long long hands and scurried quickly off. It picked the kid up in both hands like a cob of corn, and started taking bites out of them.

Later, hunger satisfied, it approached the group once more and apologized for its behavior in a pleasing, soothing human voice. It had just been so very hungry.