THE MACABRE AND BLASPHEMOUS HORROR OF CHOCOLATE CAKE TWINKLES
by M. Kelly Peach
The order of the universe has been shaken to its core. An entropic abomination, calling itself a chocolate cake Twinkle, has insinuated itself into the very fabric of Earthen space-time and the mind, as it must, reels and staggers in horror at this snack cake of Shoggothian monstrousness.
For what is a Twinkle, if not a golden, cream-filled sponge cake? And if it be otherwise, then truly are the doors of perception sundered from their hinges and the gateway of reality blasted into fragments.
First glimpsed in passing, from the corner of my eye, on the shelves of my local market in April of 2017, I felt instantly a frisson of equal parts desire and dread and was stopped, mid-stride, in the snack aisle. My eyes were drawn, nay, forced to look upon not the comforting azure packaging of genuine, aureate Twinkles, but rather the awful, lemon-hued box with a hideous, product-enlarged picture of a sepia, oblong desecration, its end lopped off and suppurating a viscous, white substance. Spellbound and trembling with unholy longing and inchoate, murmuring fears, I stretched forth my hand and, just as my fingertips were within a crumb’s breadth of the sulphurous box, it was snatched away by my wife.
“Nope. If you want a treat, you can eat the dried apricots we have at home,” she adjudged, “before they go bad.”
Thus I was freed of my ensorcellment as my spouse, still clutching my wrist, dragged me towards the dairy products. Just before we left the snack foods aisle, as my brain cleared of its bewitchment, I glanced back at the sallow display. With a burst of baleful comprehension, I knew the comparability of the maker’s name to Hastur was no coincidence.
Eyes distended, mind reeling in terror of the Unspeakable, I staggered after my beloved bride who turned to me and gently inquired, “What is your problem?”
Breathless from nightmarish woe, I gulped air as if I were at 20,000 feet. Whispering in my own darkness, my cheekbones never looking better and jawline able and willing to chisel granite, I gazed into the distance and, with ill-timed and overwrought pauses, shatnered, “It is… the… nameless… Yellow Sign.”
I trailed after my spouse. She was still pulling my wrist and commented, “Um, I don’t get how it can be nameless if it’s called the Yellow Sign. I mean, that’s its name, right?”
I opened my mouth to explain Cthulhu mythos and the diction of its high priest, E’ch-Pi-El, but she cut me off. “Whatever. I don’t want to hear it. Just grab the milk. Uh-huh, did you check the date? Good, and grab a pound of the Pinconning cheese, please. OK, I think that’s everything. Let’s go to the checkout.”
We paid for our items and, upon leaving the store, I risked a glance backwards at the Twinkle display. With but the barest sliver of the Yellow Sign visible, it nonetheless -- as if, verily, the Silver Key unlocking the gates of time and space -- smote me between the eyes. I was staggered and shouldered the side of the automatic, sliding-glass portal, nearly dropping the plastic bags filled with our sundries. As we exited the store, my wife tenderly exhorted me to "Watch where you’re going, dummy!”
For more than a year, I avoided this fane of Hastur. My memory of the umber abomination and its xanthotic coffer, dimmed by the veils of time past, faded until it seemed an illusory figment and I once again felt safe to shop the supermarket. Requiring flour, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, butter, and buttermilk, I entered the food store without trepidation and confidently sauntered to the baking needs aisle where I found the first three items on my list and placed them in my cart. Before I could proceed to the back corner of the market for my three other needful things, I was accosted by my neighbour, Clark Smith, labourer with a roofing contractor by day and scribbler of weird poems and eldritch stories by night. We spent a few pleasant minutes chatting, then we each went our separate ways to continue our shopping.
I rolled into the main aisle traversing the back of the store and turned left towards the eggs and dairy products. Striding along behind my shopping cart with assurance, my mind busy with thoughts of the new recipe for buttermilk pound cake I was planning to make, I passed the breakfast foods aisle, then the canned goods section, but found myself -- as I approached the snacks aisle -- for reasons unknown and without volition, slowing down and almost coming to a complete stop until I broke free of my baking reveries. Purposely keeping my eyes forward and refusing to look to my left at the lane of goodies, I pushed onward past the cleaning supplies, paper products, and soda beverages aisles.
After obtaining a carton of large eggs, a pound of butter, and a quart of buttermilk, I unaccountably chose not to travel to the front of the store via the frozen foods corridor and thence to the registers to check out, but instead retraced my steps until I came to the opening of the snack foods passage. As if powerful hypnotic waves were pulling at me, I turned onto the forbidden way. Fighting my trance-like state every inch, I pushed my cart slowly towards the small, free-standing display of yellow and white Twinkle boxes with the imprint of the accursed brown loaf amputated and seething a white foulness. I stopped momentarily and, like the year before, reached forth. Battling with a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I withdrew my hand and managed a step beyond the display before catching, from my peripheral vision, an addition to… The Yellow Sign.
It was a special: buy the usual box of ten and get two for free!
My resolve -- as if plucked from me by the slime-dripping tongue of the toad-god Tsathoggua and pulled into its gaping, lipless maw -- disappeared. Hapless and enthralled, I snatched a box and tore it open. I grabbed a cocoa-coloured snack cake the same size and shape of a classic golden Twinkle and ripped open the plastic sheathing. Before reaching the end of the aisle, I had devoured the chocolate treat. It was, like its counterpart, moist and cream-filled, voluptuous and delectable.
I had, in my haste, gotten a dollop of filling on my finger and licked it off as I got to the check-out line. With my brain awhirl and tongue tantalised by this unheard-of combination of creamy filling and chocolate cake, I barely remember paying the cashier and leaving the store. Nor do I recall eating another one while crossing the parking lot, a third in my car after loading my purchases, and a fourth while driving the five blocks to my home.
Parked in my driveway, I took unto me a fifth tidbit and, while sitting in my vehicle staring at the side entrance door, my mouth full of deliciousness, the spinning gyroscope of my reality righted itself as I came to understand and accept that the new, natural order of the Universe now included chocolate cake Twinkles. I swallowed the chocolatey sweetness, grabbed the two bags of groceries, and, before going into the house, popped another one in my mouth.
My soulmate was in the kitchen and, as I was putting away the purchases, noticed I was munching something.
“What are you eating?”
My mouth was too full to explain so I pointed to the opened box of chocolate Twinkles.
“Oh, really! I thought you said these were an abomination?”
I shook my head vehemently in the negative and managed, with a couple of crumbs spilling out, to splutter, “’S goo’!”
She reached into the box and grabbed a cake, commenting, “Nice of you to save me one.”
She opened it, took a bite, and murmured with pleasure as the taste sensation greeted her tongue. Scratching feverishly at the squamous backs of my hands, my teeth loosening in their sockets, my tongue lengthening at the same time it was bifurcating, and the hairs on my scalp thickening and beginning to slither, I managed to reply, spewing several more chocolate orts, “’Ur wel’m.”
For what is a Twinkle, if not a golden, cream-filled sponge cake? And if it be otherwise, then truly are the doors of perception sundered from their hinges and the gateway of reality blasted into fragments.
First glimpsed in passing, from the corner of my eye, on the shelves of my local market in April of 2017, I felt instantly a frisson of equal parts desire and dread and was stopped, mid-stride, in the snack aisle. My eyes were drawn, nay, forced to look upon not the comforting azure packaging of genuine, aureate Twinkles, but rather the awful, lemon-hued box with a hideous, product-enlarged picture of a sepia, oblong desecration, its end lopped off and suppurating a viscous, white substance. Spellbound and trembling with unholy longing and inchoate, murmuring fears, I stretched forth my hand and, just as my fingertips were within a crumb’s breadth of the sulphurous box, it was snatched away by my wife.
“Nope. If you want a treat, you can eat the dried apricots we have at home,” she adjudged, “before they go bad.”
Thus I was freed of my ensorcellment as my spouse, still clutching my wrist, dragged me towards the dairy products. Just before we left the snack foods aisle, as my brain cleared of its bewitchment, I glanced back at the sallow display. With a burst of baleful comprehension, I knew the comparability of the maker’s name to Hastur was no coincidence.
Eyes distended, mind reeling in terror of the Unspeakable, I staggered after my beloved bride who turned to me and gently inquired, “What is your problem?”
Breathless from nightmarish woe, I gulped air as if I were at 20,000 feet. Whispering in my own darkness, my cheekbones never looking better and jawline able and willing to chisel granite, I gazed into the distance and, with ill-timed and overwrought pauses, shatnered, “It is… the… nameless… Yellow Sign.”
I trailed after my spouse. She was still pulling my wrist and commented, “Um, I don’t get how it can be nameless if it’s called the Yellow Sign. I mean, that’s its name, right?”
I opened my mouth to explain Cthulhu mythos and the diction of its high priest, E’ch-Pi-El, but she cut me off. “Whatever. I don’t want to hear it. Just grab the milk. Uh-huh, did you check the date? Good, and grab a pound of the Pinconning cheese, please. OK, I think that’s everything. Let’s go to the checkout.”
We paid for our items and, upon leaving the store, I risked a glance backwards at the Twinkle display. With but the barest sliver of the Yellow Sign visible, it nonetheless -- as if, verily, the Silver Key unlocking the gates of time and space -- smote me between the eyes. I was staggered and shouldered the side of the automatic, sliding-glass portal, nearly dropping the plastic bags filled with our sundries. As we exited the store, my wife tenderly exhorted me to "Watch where you’re going, dummy!”
For more than a year, I avoided this fane of Hastur. My memory of the umber abomination and its xanthotic coffer, dimmed by the veils of time past, faded until it seemed an illusory figment and I once again felt safe to shop the supermarket. Requiring flour, sugar, vanilla extract, eggs, butter, and buttermilk, I entered the food store without trepidation and confidently sauntered to the baking needs aisle where I found the first three items on my list and placed them in my cart. Before I could proceed to the back corner of the market for my three other needful things, I was accosted by my neighbour, Clark Smith, labourer with a roofing contractor by day and scribbler of weird poems and eldritch stories by night. We spent a few pleasant minutes chatting, then we each went our separate ways to continue our shopping.
I rolled into the main aisle traversing the back of the store and turned left towards the eggs and dairy products. Striding along behind my shopping cart with assurance, my mind busy with thoughts of the new recipe for buttermilk pound cake I was planning to make, I passed the breakfast foods aisle, then the canned goods section, but found myself -- as I approached the snacks aisle -- for reasons unknown and without volition, slowing down and almost coming to a complete stop until I broke free of my baking reveries. Purposely keeping my eyes forward and refusing to look to my left at the lane of goodies, I pushed onward past the cleaning supplies, paper products, and soda beverages aisles.
After obtaining a carton of large eggs, a pound of butter, and a quart of buttermilk, I unaccountably chose not to travel to the front of the store via the frozen foods corridor and thence to the registers to check out, but instead retraced my steps until I came to the opening of the snack foods passage. As if powerful hypnotic waves were pulling at me, I turned onto the forbidden way. Fighting my trance-like state every inch, I pushed my cart slowly towards the small, free-standing display of yellow and white Twinkle boxes with the imprint of the accursed brown loaf amputated and seething a white foulness. I stopped momentarily and, like the year before, reached forth. Battling with a strength I didn’t know I possessed, I withdrew my hand and managed a step beyond the display before catching, from my peripheral vision, an addition to… The Yellow Sign.
It was a special: buy the usual box of ten and get two for free!
My resolve -- as if plucked from me by the slime-dripping tongue of the toad-god Tsathoggua and pulled into its gaping, lipless maw -- disappeared. Hapless and enthralled, I snatched a box and tore it open. I grabbed a cocoa-coloured snack cake the same size and shape of a classic golden Twinkle and ripped open the plastic sheathing. Before reaching the end of the aisle, I had devoured the chocolate treat. It was, like its counterpart, moist and cream-filled, voluptuous and delectable.
I had, in my haste, gotten a dollop of filling on my finger and licked it off as I got to the check-out line. With my brain awhirl and tongue tantalised by this unheard-of combination of creamy filling and chocolate cake, I barely remember paying the cashier and leaving the store. Nor do I recall eating another one while crossing the parking lot, a third in my car after loading my purchases, and a fourth while driving the five blocks to my home.
Parked in my driveway, I took unto me a fifth tidbit and, while sitting in my vehicle staring at the side entrance door, my mouth full of deliciousness, the spinning gyroscope of my reality righted itself as I came to understand and accept that the new, natural order of the Universe now included chocolate cake Twinkles. I swallowed the chocolatey sweetness, grabbed the two bags of groceries, and, before going into the house, popped another one in my mouth.
My soulmate was in the kitchen and, as I was putting away the purchases, noticed I was munching something.
“What are you eating?”
My mouth was too full to explain so I pointed to the opened box of chocolate Twinkles.
“Oh, really! I thought you said these were an abomination?”
I shook my head vehemently in the negative and managed, with a couple of crumbs spilling out, to splutter, “’S goo’!”
She reached into the box and grabbed a cake, commenting, “Nice of you to save me one.”
She opened it, took a bite, and murmured with pleasure as the taste sensation greeted her tongue. Scratching feverishly at the squamous backs of my hands, my teeth loosening in their sockets, my tongue lengthening at the same time it was bifurcating, and the hairs on my scalp thickening and beginning to slither, I managed to reply, spewing several more chocolate orts, “’Ur wel’m.”