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The Blob (1958, dir. Irvin Yeaworth)

It

falls

to earth.

It starts to

grow & grow & grow.

It eats poor Barney and then Kate

and then it eats the stuff inside the doctor’s office

then it eats the doctor’s car and then it eats the doctor too before heading downtown

and this whole time it’s getting bigger, bigger, bigger, growing so fast that soon it starts to eat entire buildings, to eat entire blocks

and so everyone’s afraid that it’ll eat the whole town, the state, the country, Canada and Mexico, the rest of the Americas and then the whole planet, the world itself dissolved into a red pulsating goo!

But Steve McQueen works out a way to stop the thing and shrink it so that scientists can trap it underneath the icy tundra as the freezing northern temperatures arrest its growth for good, and things go back to how they were (except for everyone who died, and the people who got hurt) now that the problem’s solved for good, forever, for “as long as the arctic stays cold.”

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Author’s note: This piece is is syllabically structured around the Fibonacci sequence: the first and second lines both have one syllable, then the third has two, then three, then five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five, then eighty-nine for the final line.

Rosalind Shoopmann currently lives in San Diego, where she recently completed an MA in English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boats Against the Current, Bullshit Lit, The Bicoastal Review, and elsewhere.

Show Rosalind some love via Venmo at @horsetrash.