Timothy walked gingerly down the hallway, each footfall seemingly deafening in his ears. He entered the kitchen, replacing the tortured wooden boards under his feet with frigid tiles that sucked the heat from his body. Opening the refrigerator as quietly as possible, Timothy blinked to adjust to the blinding light emanating from the flickering fridge light. The clinking of glass against glass echoed around the kitchen as the hundreds of sealed jars in the fridge shifted as the fridge shuttered to life.

Adjusting to the piercingly cool light, Timothy’s eyes frantically searched for the jar they were looking for. Grasping a frigid glass jar between two sets of gnarled fingers, Timothy’s arms brought it up mere inches away from the searching eyes. As he gazed wildly into the jar he heard “Not this one”.

The glass shattered as Timothy threw it to the side. Jar after jar crashed to the ground, covering the kitchen in glass and fluid, dripping from the dark wooden cupboards. “Not this one… Not this one… Not this one…” a voice scratched at Timothy’s ears, his mouth remaining unmoving. Timothy grunts with effort as his arms move to scrape the refrigerator shelves bare, crashing dozens of jars onto the floor. His eyes, nearly rolling out of their sockets, desperately searching, lock together onto a jar at the back of the newly-emptied refrigerator. “Finally.”

Timothy’s arms grasped at his filthy shirt, hanging off of his scrawny frame. Filthy fingernails tore the shirt open, revealing Timothy’s paper-thin skin, stretched taught between brittle bones. Replacing the normal human form, a gigantic mouth stretched the whole length of his torso. The mouth couldn’t stop itself from dragging its large tongue across its parched lips, wetting them. It opened wide, revealing not a set of teeth, but hundreds of arms in their place. They began stretching towards the jar at the back of the refrigerator. Finally reaching it, the hands grasped at the lid, their fingers struggling against the tightly-sealed lid. Timothy allowed his arms to grasp the jar too, finally strong enough to unscrew the brass lid.

The maw smiled, “This is the one.” One of the hundreds of hands delicately dropped into the murky liquid a human ear, half-decayed, swollen, and stained by the dark liquid. Dropping the ear into the cavernous mouth, it would have smiled, if it had any teeth to show. The arms suddenly all reached into the jar, desperately grasping for the remaining treats. The opening was quickly filled with the arms, leaving the remaining to desperately put their limited strength into banging on the frigid glass of the jar. One by one the decomposing ears were dropped into the maw, taking its time to enjoy each one.

“Timothy!?” A sudden woman’s voice coming from the entrance of the kitchen, now bright from the overhead light, caused the mouth and Timothy to freeze. “What have I said about causing a mess when feeding it? Back to your room!” Timothy slowly looked up. “Sorry Mom.”