A darkness in the river… Naming the nameless

She stared at the beast crawling out of the frozen river. It’s lips looked like two black leather couches sealed in dripping wax. Black arms scraped at the concrete boat ramp with slimy metallic slashing that pierced her ear canals with vehement chopping a of wood-chipper hostility.

She could only stare; her dog, Polly, already scampered towards the woods beyond her and the canal with anxious urgency.

The big black body of the creature squeaked and squalled as the river’s ice clunked and clattered beneath its oozing, pulsing surges. The mouth unleashed the dark scent of death, foul sweetness of salty low tide and day old vomit. The eyes were black bulges sticking out like traffic-cone skin tags that apathetically took in the world with a silent destructive rage.

Without thought, only the electric impulse of instinct, the sliming, hulking, sulking beast opened its toothless infinite mouth around the girl.

Soaked with urine, and urinating with soaking fear, her instinct, too, chimed into creation.

“What is your name?” She questioned, fighting back her own sickness as the darkness of stench and eternal silence whistled hollowly around her being. She looked into the endless dark of the mouth before her, the slime of the the dark giant’s lips shlopped down upon her red shoes.

The beast’s mouth halted. Frozen. Unquaking, unmoving, the electrons within its atoms even stuttered to function. It’s indifferent eyes wriggled in sudden thought.

In the eternal mud of the earth’s core, which it had lived to devour all things for eternity, the beast had never wondered its own name. The name is the purpose, the name implies future and destiny, a life that might be created from the shadows of infinite darkness. Even hell and it’s demonic renters were deemed to be breathe the air of purpose.

“Name?” The ground shook with vibratos unending. The river, in which most of the beast’s body lay, rippled with the dark sub-baritone vocality earth quakes could not create.

“I have no name…do you have… a name?” The black slime of the creature asked, it’s lips tickling the girl’s hair and flower printed dress.

“Ye-Yes…” she stammered. “I’m Pepper.”

The beast closed it’s mouth and pushed itself away from this solitary girl who had been walking her dog in the setting sun of January alone at the canal behind her house.

“I am the eater of the world, the darkness in the bottom of the bowels.”

“But. Do you have a name?”

Silence erupted as a distant seagull bravely cackled at the gray clouds above.

“I can call you Gregory. Does that work?” Pepper asked, herself backing away from the boat ramp’s edge, and trying to fling off the slime of eternity that had dropped voluminously upon her favorite outfit.

The giant dark beast, resembling the dark face of an evil salmon, shuttered with a soothing calmness, it’s endless tail and black body made the black waters ripple infinitely into the riverbed.

“Gregory, World Eater.” The fish-mouthed beast licked its Range Rover sized lips and did what a godless beast of legend might do to resemble a smile.

“Food for thought,” Pepper said.

The beast—or Gregory, World Eater, silently slithered back into the depths of the river, into the bowels of all things, happy with Pepper’s name, the world lasting an eon longer for its happiness.

Pepper turned and screamed with tears as she waddled towards her home, falling several times in her coats of slime. Polly, hearing her master’s wails, skidded out of the woods to the rescue, and the two came home in a whirling mess of mud.

Pepper’s mother yelled at her for her fantastical excuses for staying out after dark, walking the dog without a leash, and of course, ruining her brand new dress.