Day 12: Spoiled Rotten

Day 12: Spoiled Rotten

List six disgusting you’ve found in your refrigerator (or have heard others describe they found in theirs).


Cheddar cheese, dried out to a plastic transparency
Onions growing roots
Tomatoes with skin still intact but all mushy inside
Water bottle smelling of stale, uncooked fish
Cola spilled all over the bottom
Leftover beef soup frozen over with its oil
Use all six in a story, start with Whenever he mentions Paris . . .

. . . I shudder at the recollection of crashing at his pad there. Paris was my last stop on my 10-city tour of Europe, and I was running out of money, so I had no choice but accept Stefan's hospitality. I hate to sound ungrateful (he was very gracious after all to readily offer me a couch at his place when I told him I was visiting Paris) but he was the ultimate slob, and the place isn't fit for humans, it's literally a pig sty. I guess he adapted too easily to the Vietnamese pot-bellied pig he kept there.



To be fair, he was the typical foreign student, trying to juggle school work, parties (!), a part-time job, a budding romance with a pretty local, and taking care of his beloved piggy.

He told me to help myself to anything in his refrigerator (anything, edibles or otherwise!). A milk drinker, he never ran out of fresh milk, and he almost always had no leftover milk, thank god. The only stinking dairy product that obviously has outlived its shelf life is a chunk of cheddar cheese, metamorphosed into something like those fake sushi or steaks displayed in tacky restaurants. Only those fake ones look tasty enough to eat, while the cheese in his fridge has dried to a hardness that you could use in construction (it would put a brick to shame).

I still couldn't understand why keeps buying vegetables if he couldn't make a meal to save his life. He leaves them all to rot: onions already growing roots, fit for planting, tomatoes with the skin still intact but already mushy inside.

Obviously something left over from eating out sometime ago, a styro bowl of beef soup, frozen over with its oil, shares the cold space with the already-smelly vegetables. Throw in a puddle of cola at the bottom, and I say, I think he's trying to build himself a high-tech compost pit.

Ah, but he doesn't mind it at all. He chugs down water that smells of rotten fish. How do I know? Because I once made the mistake of drinking from the same bottle.

Before my 10 days was over, though, I developed immunity. I found myself deftly shoving aside the dried cheese to make room for newly-bought wedges, positioning the onions so that the roots are immersed in the nutritious spilled cola, and the tomatoes actually make excellent toys for the pot-bellied pig to chase after. I just make sure it (the pig) doesn't catch it, because I return it to its rightful place in the fridge, as if it hadn't been touched.

What? I'd never dare clean out my friend's refrigerator and risk insulting him, after the hospitality he's shown me.