Crockery
01 Nov 2021Today’s prompt: “Start a story with the line ‘My mother broke every plate in the house that day.’”
My mother broke every plate in the house that day. It started when a demon from the Madrina dimension flattened its face against the kitchen window, all teeth and eyeballs and pustules and snarls.
Mom shrieked. “Dear god, what is that thing?” And then she said to me, “Do you recognize it from your studies?”
“Guarja demon, I’m pretty sure,” I said, grateful those had been on the last Demonology 201 pop quiz. I grabbed my copy of Rathbone’s Introduction to Demon Physiology: 4th Edition and flipped to the index, then to page 327. “Yep, Guarja. From the Madrina dimension. They travel in enormous packs.”
“So I see,” my mom said, as hundreds of eyes stared at her through the kitchen window.
“They ooze an incredibly acidic secretion from their pustules that can easily cut through metal,” I continued reading aloud.
“Oh dear,” my mother said, listening to the sizzle of our steel door. “What do we do?”
“We’re in luck,” I said, stabbing my finger at a paragraph midway down the page. “They can be easily warded off with broken crockery. We just need to make a large enough perimeter to protect ourselves.”
Mom handed me a stack of large bowls and got to work smashing the dinner plates. We swept most of the broken pieces into a large enough circle that the Guarja demons couldn’t get close enough to us to spit acid on us. We kept a pile of crockery chips in the center and chucked them at the demons until they howled in pain and eventually abandoned us.
As I duct-taped cardboard over the hole in our door and my mother swept up the broken dishes, I asked aloud, “I wonder who opened the rift between their dimension and ours.”
Turns out it was you, and they tore and oozed you apart. And that’s what you get for opening an interdimensional rift before you’d even finished Demonology 201.