Sasha Martin's Ripping News, the Podcast: Teaser 3

Listener discretion is advised, as the following audio contains nudity.

Sascha’s Gobbly Goo had gobbled all the school and its affairs - all the big kids and their teachers, all the little kids and theirs, and Miss Hat (the boss), the office staff, the helpers come to read, and the parents in the tuck shop, where the children liked to feed. And the walkers on the footpath, and the people driving past, and the world-acknowledged Periwinkle Palace of the Past.

But the goo found such a treat within the sewer pipes below, and was eating what it found there, in accelerated flow, until it sizzled through the S-bends to a terminus at last, and exploded out of everybody’s toilets with a blast.

There were houses disappearing, there were gardens going splat, there was Landfill not existing, in a moment, just like that.

A community devoured, every cat and every dog, every budgie, rat and guinea pig, and everyone agog.

There were sirens in the distance, there was screaming all about. Then the screaming turned to gurgles, and the sirens fizzled out.

As he rose and fell like everyone, undressed and unprepared, Sascha saw an aberration down below him, and he stared.

But that very aberration soon engulfed him, in a flash, as he landed, like the others, with a soggy kind of splash, and the goo collapsed around him.

It was sticky, it was vast - just an ocean made of mucus, into which they all were cast.

For the goo had ceased to gobble, which he couldn’t understand. It was something he’d been, hitherto, unable to command.

And it clung to little bodies as they struggled through the muck, spitting spiders, slugs and worms and saying, ‘Ew!’ and ‘Oh!’ and ‘Yuck!’

Till at last they reached an island, made of crusty drying snot, that was forming on the surface as the goo began to clot.

There, a host of furry animals, alarmed but properly dressed, ran in agitated circles round the bare and dispossessed.

Weary children sought amusement on the island’s sticky strand, building castles out of mucus, as they might have done with sand.

‘Now we’re stateless!’ Aggie stated, as she fossicked and she ranged, in a garment made of earthworms that she’d artfully arranged. And she wandered up to Sascha, who was lying where he’d dropped, and she asked him, looking pensive, why the Gobbly Goo had stopped.

‘Well, it could have hit the ocean, and reacted to the salt? Or it might have reached the mantle, where the heat wouldn’t make it halt?’

‘I expect you mean,’ said Aggie, ‘that you haven’t got a clue.’

Then she built a brontosaurus out of semi-clotted goo.

Teachers tried to call for order, but the order was ignored, for the garb of their authority was lost, and unrestored. So they set themselves apart, and sought to cover what they could, and they gazed upon the prospect, and the prospect wasn’t good.

For the sunlight shimmered brightly on the snotty yellow sea, and beyond it there was - nothing, for as far as they could see.

The end.

For now.