I used to be like you, a naive fool who thought yogurt was safe. I thought it could be trusted. I thought it couldn’t kill! God was I wrong. OH GOD!!!...was I wrong. The trouble all began as any interaction with yogurt does, with a trip to the grocery store.
I had just gotten done with work as a parking lot attendant in the busy metropolitan center called Indianapolis. The job is really easy…really REALLY easy. You literally sit there and watch people leave. The machine in front does all the work. The only reason I have to be there is in case someone has a problem or the machine breaks…that and I’m a failure at life, but also if the machine breaks. So that means for 8 hours I pretty much just sit there with a dumb look on my face waiting for something to happen. Because of the long exposure to nothing and no one, my brain isn’t exactly primed and ready to deal with a problem when it comes up. See how well you’d do with some complicated monetary complaint on two hours of sleep and 8 hours of sitting and staring. Without stimulation, your brain will literally turn into a grey electric lump of stupid. This was one of those nights when it did.
Like I said, I had just left this mind lumpingly slow job, and I had to make a run to the grocery store before I went home. I was in such a ludicrous brain fog that I was wandering around the isles looking for something to eat in the morning. Something wholesome. Something traditional. Something cheap. Trying to balance those three needs in my head was like trying to catch a fly by squeezing a frog’s butt 'til its tongue shoots out…I just couldn’t lick it.
Finally, in the dairy isle, my head was clear enough for a minute to see some yogurt. “That’s probably better than a big breakfast sandwich or something…” I thought. “As long as it doesn’t have too much sugar. Maybe I’ll do what my pappy does and mix it with some straight up plain yogurt. Wow, look at that lady’s ass. Don’t stare creep. You’re married. Yeah, wed not dead. I hate when young people laugh,” because my thoughts are often scattered and come in thick and fast.
No longer thinking about the yogurt, my body moving reflexively, I grabbed the first thing of yogurt that caught my eye. This is exactly the kind of mind state big companies want you to be in when you look at their branding. They want your subconscious to be picking up on their ingenious little subliminal messages and instructions embedded in their packaging. That’s how they get you! I mean it’s not really a big deal anyway, ‘cause I was already going to buy something and it may as well be random yogurt, but still. It feels invasive.
As I grabbed the yogurt, I notice the packaging looked a little unusual. Like it was too pleasant and too wholesome, like the way you’d see an old-timey photo of settlers or something and they’re all in a setting like they should be having fun, but instead everyone is stone-faced. I looked closer and couldn’t really pinpoint the problem, but I still felt a little pang of concern, the way you do when you know there was something important you need to do, but don’t remember what it is. So, I thought, “Weird…whatever…I wonder if there will be any fish left in the oceans by the time I’m old…Damn I feel fat in these pants,” the thoughts coming in thick and fast again. I took my stuff up, checked out, and went home in a hurry.
At home, as I normally do, I started eating all the junk food first: cola candy, pizza pockets, chicken pucks (Cluck Puckstm), soda shakes, fizzing ham, walnut rockets, gemmy wyrms…the kind of stuff doctors warn you not to eat. In the freaky food binge, I completely forgot about my commitment to a wholesome, traditional breakfast of plain, white, benign yogurt. Sadly, in the morning the freaky food binge resumed. And so it did the morning after and the morning after and the morning after that, and on and on into the days and weeks ahead.
Then one day, about 9 months later, I woke up and went to the kitchen. I didn’t even notice it at first, but there was a pinkish-white, sloppy goo leaking from the fridge. I had already gone over to it, opened the door, and stood looking in for some breakfast before feeling something wriggling around between my toes. When I looked down, I saw the goo seeping into my pig-shaped slippers. I couldn’t be sure, but I swore I saw the goo pulsing and squirming on my slipper.
“Ugh!” I grunted as I kicked my little piggy off in a flurry.
Just then, I heard the gloppy sound of something squishing away in the corner. When I looked to see what it was, I noticed a trail of slimy white guck about as wide as a soccer ball leading back to the fridge. A horrible, sour smell filled the room coming from the trail as it began to bubble and degrade. Again, I could hear a clattering sound coming from the second floor of my apartment, and I turned around in a panic, looking up through my living room to the balcony railing of my upstairs hallway.
Before I could even think about going up there and checking out what it was (which I didn’t want to do because I was suitably freaked at this point), I suddenly became aware of the strange wriggling sensation between my toes again. I rushed to the sink and plopped my foot in to wash the strange, living goop from between my toes.
I thought, My god…is this shit all over my foot the yogurt I bought forever ago? I could’ve sworn I threw that shit away. Why’s it so bubbly and squirmy? What was that fucking snail trail coming from the fridge? Is it what’s making the noise? Wait, that was over nine months ago. Was some sick entity born of my negligence and revolting eating habits? Is this hideous birth a punishment for my disregard for healthy, wholesome food? It’s boring, but I guess I could’ve eaten more stuff that was good for me. I guess I could’ve found a way to enjoy the plainness of the yogurt for its own sake. I’m sorry, God! Please abort this heinous yogurt child I spawned, junk food as my seed, refrigerator as the unwilling womb which gestated this curse, this foundling, this abomination!” because I can get pretty dramatic in stressful situations. But, no, God would not destroy this festering yogurt…thing. It would only get worse.
With my foot clean and seemingly uninjured, I decided to see what was causing the noise. It was easy given the trail it made. I followed it through the kitchen, the living room, and up the stairs into my bathroom. I should confess now that my apartment is kind of a shit-hole. Well, it’s more than just kind of a shit-hole; it’s FULLY a shit-hole. The paint’s peeling, there are holes in the walls, it leaks when it rains, I’m pretty sure there’s asbestos, lead, and radon — and pests infest its every nook and cranny.
I see the door to my bathroom is closed, but the trail goes under it, so I know that whatever it was could be found on the other side. I peeked in slowly after opening the door a crack. To my relief, I saw the bucket of yogurt empty in the middle of the floor with a silly little rat sniffing around it. The tiny critter was covered in the yogurty filth. I laughed and laughed at myself.
I had felt so guilty about the freaky food binges, that I dreamt up this whole crazy anxiety about some kind of monster yogurt child being conjured from my gluttonous ways. It was just a silly rat looking for a yogurt snack. I have a way of living at peace with the cuter pests in my place. I don’t know why I didn’t realize it sooner. It must’ve been my guilt.
“You silly little starvin’ fella! Lemme get you something proper to eat that won’t make you sick,” I said as I reached down to grab the container.
Suddenly, a pinkish white goopy glop of yogurt slurped its way out from behind the toilet and wrapped its way around the poor rat. The rodent curled, jumped, and sprawled in response, but like a curdled dairy amoeba, the glop enveloped it with a predatory speed. It was as quick and precise as a python or an octopus contorting and constricting around its prey. I could hear crunching and snapping noises as the rat cried out in pain one last time. It gurgled as it drowned and crumpled within the sour mass. I stood there, my jaw nearly TO THE FLOOR as I bore witness to this living dairy disaster.
The ball of hungering yogurt slowly relaxed and moved closer to the wall, leaving a steaming pile of rat bones and fur on the floor of my bathroom. My face was twisted in a rictus of disgust and awe as I continued to observe the pile. The ball pulsated as if it were a beating heart upon the floor for a moment or two until it rested in a tight pile. It seemed to harden as it lay there. After a time, could’ve been five seconds or an hour for all I knew, I decided to try to capture whatever monstrosity this once wholesome dairy product had become.
I slowly resumed my approach to grab the container, thinking maybe a lab in town might want to study this thing and pay me a tidy sum for it. I careful placed my hand over the plastic tub. No reaction from the blob. I picked it up and held it poised over the curdled creature, the opening facing down, ready to ensnare it. I swung it down, and at just the right moment, the blob expanded and leapt out at me. It was like someone shot a yogurty blanket at me. It even made this hideous little hissing sound as it came.
With cat-like reflexes, I moved the tub in the way like a shield, screamed, and fell backwards on my ass. I could feel the yogurt demon try to cover my hands and the tub. I tilted it up over me and used its momentum to carry it over onto the door behind me with SCHLUR-PLUMPH sound. Some of the goo was still on my hands as I continued to scream. The sound seemed to irritate the creature, and it slipped fluidly along the edges of the room into the corner before disappearing into a hole behind the toilet.
After seeing what it did to the rat, I was afraid of what the residue could do to my hands. I quickly washed them under the shower with the tub so nothing of it was left in the room with me. I let the tub run after that for a few minutes, so I was sure it was all washed away.
I realized it must’ve tried to do me like the rat when I was in the kitchen, but I was too big for it to crunch up. At least, for now. It had already grown since I saw a glimpse of it in the kitchen. Thinking I was in the clear for now, and half-convinced I was just hallucinating, I backed up out of the bathroom slowly. I was tempted to stick my face in the hole in the wall, but I had seen enough horror movies to know that was a dumb idea unless I wanted my face shellacked by hot, hungry yogurt with a taste for flesh (assuming that thing I saw was even real).
I went back to my living room and sat there stunned for a moment. I had shut the door firmly and I was sitting where I could still see it in case the thing tried to break out. I was sitting there thinking for a while. I started laughing at myself when I remembered a few weeks ago I had hallucinated a full alien octopus type creature and talked to it for quite a while before realizing it was just in my head.
I wasn’t tripping or anything, I just have a weird brain, and I see crazy shit sometimes for no reason. Could be a tumor, could be a virus, could be Quetzalcoatl communicating through a thin beam of pink light directly into my brain! — I don’t know. A doctor could probably tell me, but then they’d make the crazy shit I see go away, and I kind of like my hallucinations. I still really miss that octopus alien. I realized I was probably just so annoyed at myself for letting the yogurt expire, I had a bad hallucination about it.
At some point as I was meditating on the whole situation, letting my heart slow back down, I noticed that the normal din of background vermin noises had stopped. There were no warring rats, no cockroaches hissing, no spiders skittering. It was weirdly quiet. I looked at the door again, but it hadn’t budged. Not sure why I was surprised by that. Maybe I missed my little freaky friend, Yo-Gurty Burty too.
Then I looked at the clock. I had been sitting there pondering for about twenty minutes! Just as I was about to get back up and go about my day, I heard a creaking and groaning noise from the ceiling. I looked up and saw the ceiling bulging and cracking above me. A thick, pink goo began to seep through the cracks.
“THE YOGURT!!!” I screamed as I jumped off the couch just in time to hear the ceiling break into a hundred pieces above the spot where I had been sitting.
I turned and looked at the hideous mass of yogurt, now ten times the size it had been twenty minutes before in the bathroom! It was filled with rat bones and bug parts. There was a snake and a little tiny dog in there too. I gasped, and a hot knob of goo lurched out towards my gaping mouth hole!
I ducked down and covered my mouth with my hand, and the proboscis of protoplasm sailed through the air behind me into the wall. It crushed it with a violent smashing sound and began to spread hungrily across the filthy, dilapidated surface. The wretched pile of biomorphic yogurt slime made a hideously shrill wailing sound as it began to slowly ooze off the couch towards me.
“HARRY KRISHNA!!!” I screamed.
In a panic, I tried to go under the discharged tentacle and run for the door.
BIG! MISTAKE!
The disgusting thing screamed again like a pterodactyl, disconnected from the wall, and wrapped its dairy-based pseudopod around my neck. I screamed accidentally and I could feel the fluid arm of the creature trying to soup its way into my mouth! I closed my mouth in time, but the yogurt demon was strong. The pink, spoiled flesh of the creature started to try and force its way into my closed mouth. I clenched my teeth as hard as I could, repelling the creature from inserting itself over the lips and passed the gums, but look out nose, here it comes! The pasty substance began to crawl into my nostrils, and I began to claw at the little pink fingers snaking up to my schnozz. I poked myself in the nose a couple of times but managed to get the thing away from my orifices.
Suddenly, the raging pile of pink bile lifted me up into the air and pulled me in toward it. I screamed and dropped my weight just like they taught me in karate class in elementary school, so I’d be harder for it to lift. Basically, I lifted myself up about an inch with my arms locked around the tentacle and dropped myself down ass-first as hard I could straight down. I hit the ground right on the butt bone, but I had moved all my weight quickly enough that the cretinous creature lost its grip on me for a sec.
It was strong, but thankfully not very fast or smart. The tentacle withdrew back into the belligerent blob and something inside of it seemed to pitch and roll within it as it made its way off the couch to find me. It’s fluid body blurped and blorped sickly as it crawled slowly all over the ground. I was staying very still, almost in shock, but also to feel out how this thing would try to find me again—was it by sound? Or vibration? Or smell? Taste? I didn’t know, but I was sure I wasn’t hallucinating now.
I never had a trip so bad I could feel it try to slime-fuck my mouth open or strangle me! I guess it could’ve been some weird sexual nightmare, but real or not; I was not feeling it. I shimmied backwards on my elbows as it got a little closer.
As soon as it touched the spot on the floor I had been sitting on, it shrieked out the same high-pitched pterodactyl scream it had earlier, but this time, there was this low, booming growl, almost like the sound right toward the end of a lion’s roar. It shook the whole room. I could feel its power in my chest, and I knew…IT WAS ON!!!
It lurched forward at me, and I kicked up into the great wave of goo falling down on me. It seemed to shock the creature for a moment, ‘cause I can kick like a fuckin’ man-mule in heat. It was viscous and vicious, like killy silly putty and it bounced back from my foot a little way before recovering quickly and grabbing onto my foot.
I screamed, “NOOO!” as the mass of evil dairy pulled me into it deeper and deeper.
I rolled over onto my stomach and looked for something to grab onto, but I realized that wouldn’t help. It would just crawl up my body like hell's own pudding and devour me. Before it could, I got up onto my knees, grabbed a bong I had on the coffee table and smashed it against the creature. It made a grumpy little sound but didn’t stop pulling me into it. Then I stabbed down with the shattered glass and managed to cut the chunk attached to me off of the gooey blob, freeing my legs.
I stood up quickly, but the thing tried to snatch me with another tendril. I thought it might attack me again, so I had already begun to turn to face it. My eyes beheld the glob of goo soaring through the air, straight to center mass. I managed to successfully backhand it off the path without it snagging me again, but the struggle was getting desperate. I did not want to know what happens inside of that big pink pocket! So I ran to the kitchen to find a weapon.
It roared again, and I could hear it crunching the trash strewn around the floor as it followed behind me. It was across the room when I started throwing knives at it. I only got about two to stick. The ones that did sank harmlessly back into the fluid flesh of the abomination. I swore I could hear some mischievous laughter coming from the pugnacious pile, like a little snickering sound. It started to shake around and vibrate. Suddenly, one of the knives flew out like a bullet and sunk deep into my shoulder.
“MERCIFUL MOSES!!!” I screamed in agony before the next blade came flying out at me.
I managed to duck behind the counter this time. It stuck firmly into the wall behind me. I don’t know why, but I was disappointed to see that it was just a little paring knife. I think it was because I took the big butcher knife in the arm and wished it had just been the little baby knife sticking out of there. At this point, I stopped throwing shit at it, because it was just going to come flying back at me…MUCH harder. The knife hurt like a bastard, and even though I know you’re not supposed to, I pulled it out. I was facing it when the monstrosity came barreling at me again.
This is it, I thought. Killed by my love of SHITTY food! I guess it would’ve happened either way, I just didn’t think it’d be this disgusting and violent. God in heaven and all His saint’s and angels, please, if you can hear me, deliver me from this horrible fate: suffocated and digested by a blob of living yogurt.
Feeling the power of this prayer, I called upon The Holy Ones.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, Buddah, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rasta Mon, General Patton, Kentaro Miura, Willie Nelson, Master Shake, Frylok, Meatwad, and BRUCE FUCKING LEE, I STAB AT THEE!!!” I roared. Thundering forward, in the full power of My Thiccness, I resolved to make what was sure to be my final stand against the satanic power of yogurt neglected.
I grabbed a dirty wok that was laying on my counter, the kind that’s so big it’s almost like a shield. I purchased it in an ill-advised attempt to make delicious curry that I didn’t have the culinary acumen to execute. Its handle was long enough I could grip it with two hands. It helped me block another tentacle whip attack, and another, until I was close enough to start swinging and smashing at it overhand with the wok.
Much to my surprise, it seemed to recoil from the blows as it began to make little pathetic squeaking sounds and pained screams. Pieces of it began to fling off this way and that, as again and again and again I swung my furious Wok of Wrath down atop the pink, gelatinous, viscous, gooey, rancid, seeping, disgusting, revolting, sickening, putrescent, repugnant pile of pugnacious yogurt filth! It began to back up again into the living room, where first we joined in battle. Knowing The Holy Ones had heard me, I called upon them again as I continued my savage swinging.
“For Odin!” SMASH!!!
“For Asgard!” CRASH!!!
“For The Einherjar!” BASH!!!
“For Predator!” SLAM!!!
“For Alien!” BAM!!!
“YOUR MOMMA!” CRUSH!!!
“YOUR GRANDMOMMA!” BLAM!!!
“YOUR!” POW!!!
“GRAND-!” THUD!!!
“MOMMA’S!” WHACK!!!
“MOMMAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!” BOOM!!!
I looked down and saw the blob had shrunken to a more manageable size, maybe small enough to fit in a hamper of clothes. Since I was getting too tired to lift the wok, I decided to drop it and start pulling the beast apart with my hands. I dropped to my knees with an exhausted thud. I began to furiously pull out clump after clump of yogurt in big pink handfuls and throw it wherever I could. Soon the room was covered in little flecks of pink goo and there was nothing in front of me but a little baseball size glob of goo. I wrapped my hand over my fist and reached back over my head. With one final, two-handed smash, I crushed what remained of the yogurt monster. It squeaked and hissed like a cockroach as I destroyed its last morsel.
God, I thought. I’ll never neglect the wholesome power of yogurt ever again…or maybe I’ll just never buy that brand again, I don’t know. It seems unlikely to happen twice either way. What are the odds?”
I rested there on my hands and knees for a moment, trying to catch my breath and incorporate this new information about the dangers of yogurt into a livable worldview. I wondered if yogurt could have been responsible for many of histories great tragedies: The death of the dinosaurs, the JFK assassination, the systematic genocide of the Native Americans, maybe even the disappearance at Roanoke. Could it have been barrels of spoiled yogurt brought over from England? Did they even bring barrels of yogurt? Either way, I was going to have to go online, do some inadequate research, and speculate wildly about the implications, as is customary.
Could Hitler have actually been made of this demon yogurt? If he wasn’t, thank god this particular genus of yogurt never found it’s way into his kraut clutches, or the Allies would’ve been fucked! Maybe this stuff was just like the goo in Ghostbusters 2, something born of the negative emotions in this city. If that’s true, that would explain why I was only able to defeat it once I summoned my courage and power. It fed off my energy and weakened it.
That’s the moral of the story I guess: DON’T disrespect yogurt…
…OH WAIT!!!...
I forgot to mention: The whole time I was pondering this stuff, I was looking directly at the ground, so I failed to notice as all the yogurt started to seep into the cracks in the walls. I guess it must’ve been joining together in the floor beneath me, because before I knew it, the death yogurt shot up through the floor in an angry wriggling pillar five feet in front of my face!
Its scream was so terrible and earsplitting, I winced in pain. When I opened my eyes again, a tentacle was shooting straight at me. I flew backwards into the kitchen again, but it didn’t grab me. I think it was flexing on me by showing it could hit twice as hard as I could. It worked. I suddenly realized I was too tired to defend myself. My arms were burning inside from the effort. My back felt twisted and wracked. My knees were frozen. I had given it everything I had and all I did was piss it off! I was a goner for sure now. The power of My Thiccness had failed me. Arnold Schwarzenegger had failed me…even Rasta Mon had failed me.
But I wasn’t going to give up! I could still move, so rolled onto my back to see if it was coming for me, which of course it was. In a last-ditch effort to save myself I began throwing anything that was on the floor or on a shelf in arms reach at the gelatinous mass: pens, paper, soda cans, beer bottles, ash trays, can-openers, coffee cups, anything! It didn’t even bother throwing anything at back at me, just absorbed them into its abominable body. It could sense my desperation now and it crawled at me so slowly, it was as if it were taunting me, savoring every last second of its well fought victory. I could tell it was going to take its time and really enjoy devouring me, which was obviously going to SUCK!
I had crawled over to the sink, or rather, just below the sink, in front of the cupboard where I keep all the cleaning supplies I always forget to use. I opened it frantically, trying to grab anything heavy. The creature suddenly screamed forward and its whole body opened into something like a mouth, filled with all the implements I had been throwing at it. Broken glass from the bottles, pens, letter openers and other sharp objects lined the inside. It looked like the Sarlacc Pit or Shai-Hulud made of office supplies and kitchen utensils. Just as I was about to get punctured like a prisoner in an Iron Maiden by this creature’s newfound mouth, I grabbed a huge bottle of bleach from the cupboard, unscrewed the cap, and tossed it into the yogurt's fiendish crevasse.
Once the bleach touched its mouth, its pained shriek wailed out again. Immediately, it began to shrink and shiver, so much it almost looked like it was boiling. Long spike-shaped strands began to pop out and fall back onto the blob limply. Something really damaging was happening to it.
Cleaning supplies must be its weakness! I thought.
I kept rummaging around in the sink, grabbing anything I could and throwing it into the blob’s body: Drano, Ajax, Comet, Scrubbing Bubbles, Dish Soap, Toilet Bowl Cleaner. The creature’s body couldn’t expel it quickly enough. It began bubbling and foaming as it rolled and pitched all over, trying to reshape itself, but it was no use. I had found it’s Achilles' heel. It was such a sloppy gloppy filthy mess, that cleaning supplies were the one thing it couldn’t handle. Finally, the remnants of the blob exploded all over the kitchen. I waited vigilantly this time as the viscous yogurt became more like a bubbling syrupy mess spread out all around my kitchen floor. This time I was sure it was defeated.
I stood up and went to the bathroom to find the tub the yogurt had been packaged in. On the front, in bold capital letters, it said: UNCLE ZIO'S ARTISANAL ITALIAN YOGURT
“I know about greek yogurt, but italian yogurt? What is this?” I said to myself as I continued to study the packaging.
On the back, in very small print at the bottom of the container it read:
Mfg. Three Mile Island, New Jersey
Thank god I didn't eat this, I gasped. This nuclear mutant yogurt could've irradiated my thyroid and turned me into human soup! Why would they even make this?
Just then I notice that behind the letters, almost completely hidden by them, was a hideous picture of yogurt covering a city and in the center was an image not unlike The Scream, but it was a human face enveloped in crushing yogurt and being sucked into a roiling abyss of dairy destruction.
Dear Lord, they knew...this must be some kind of evil plan!
“How the fuck did I not see that?” I said out loud, disgusted by my own stupidity.
I walked back down to the kitchen and looked out the window. I was staring at my neighbors houses, just catching my breath and thinking of what kind of psycho would make sweet, simple, wholesome yogurt into cesium-fueled, turbo-charged, nuclear slime monsters from hell, when I suddenly heard a scream. I saw movement from the corner of my eye.
I turned and through my window, saw a giant pink tentacle blast through the outside wall of my neighbors' house, my poor neighbor screaming from the end of it. All at once, there was screaming everywhere, as one by one every house I could see began to overflow with evil pink and white slime.
My god, it's happening everywhere...I thought. I have to warn them!
I grabbed all the cleaning supplies I could from my house, dumped them in a duffle bag, and sprinted outside. Feeling like a big tough movie hero who says lines to no one in particular, with my eye twitching in hatred, I said,
“This whole city's about to become...lactose intolerant.”
END
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