Fridge of the Joyful Mysteries

From the vaults

Okay, so my roommate Frédérique and I have this tiny refrigerator. It's actually mine, but I'm not very territorial; as long as I have space for my insulin I'm fine. Right now Fred is going on a trip, so she's been eating all her fridge food so it doesn't spoil. Right decent of her.

Current contents of the refrigerator:

• lo-fat mozzarella cheese (not very good at all)
  
• medium cheddar cheese
  
• peanut butter
  
• butter-flavored shortening (have had this for 6 months. it's scary)
  
• brewer's yeast
  
• assorted condiments stolen from cafeteria, in packets
  
• delicious insulin
  
• sports bottles of water getting cold
  
• jelly (apple)
  
• jam (seedless blackberry)
  
• sugar-free maple syrup
  
• a diet shake
  
• a yogurt cup
  
• two ice packs (in freezer compartment)
  

I bought the yogurt at our take-out cafeteria the other day. Everyone is leaving early for Spring Break and cashing in their meal points, so the cafeteria looks positively Communist. When I went there were some unpopular ice cream treats, some 2% milk, Mounds bars and a big box of foil-wrapped Rice Krispie treats. Ick.

Woke up this morning entirely too early. I had a paper to turn in to a teacher's office at 8. (Fred had one in the same building at 10, which I ended up turning in as well. Save some time for her; she's packing to go to Baja California tonight.) I was a little dizzy and my left leg was numb: my idiosyncratic signs of low blood sugar. Fun way to start the day. I opened the refrigerator to get one of my diet shakes, and saw a

HUGE PUDDLE OF RED LIQUID.

Weird. It had pooled around the shortening and had no obvious source. I tried to figure out what was red in the refrigerator, what could have leaked, with no success. I picked up the tub of fake butter and inspected it. It wasn't bleeding.

The red liquid smelled sort of like strawberries.

I was more concerned about getting my blood sugar back up. I figured the liquid would not be much worse in a few minutes, and I would feel better.

Fred got back from the bathroom, and I asked her if she knew anything about this or if I should call a priest. I wasn't accusatory in tone; it was more of a mystery than anything. She expressed interest and confusion equal to my own and denied all knowledge of it.

Well, mysterious or not, it needed to be cleaned up. She watched with that early morning apathy while I got the sponge. I didn't want to seem gross -- we didn't know what this was -- so I delicately smelled the sponge. Definitely some kind of artificial fruit. The texture was odd; it was sort of gelatinous. I surreptitiously tasted some. It was a little sweet.

I moved things out of the refrigerator and washed them in the process. Clearing the bottom shelf off, it appeared to be leaking from the seam of the shelf. Uh-oh. Maybe it was some kind of important refrigerator fluid that shouldn't be leaking. I started thinking about what would spoil and what wouldn't.

Then I looked at the leak a little closer. I wasn't wearing my specs, after all. The leak followed the crack of the shelf seam, then led to the freezer compartment.

D'oh. I remembered: I had gotten some Italian ices at the cafeteria and put them in the freezer. It's not a very good freezer, but it usually has the ability to keep things frozen if they start out that way. However, I had recently defrosted it (the other thing it was good at was frost accumulation), and I guess that robbed it of its freezing ability.

One of the cherry ones had leaked. They were all pretty creepy; there's a lot of gelatin or some other coagulating substance in an Italian ice. Not something you want to face unfrozen, but I ate them anyway. My blood sugar got back to normal, the refrigerator was clean, the mystery was solved and I turned in my paper on time.

Fred thought it was awfully funny. I did too. We agreed that it was more fun to wake up in the morning when there is some sort of weird thing happening. If there were a glowing spectre going through my underwear drawer or a floating cat head by the telephone, things would be much more interesting. Pools of mysterious blood are okay, too.

We also had to call off our plans to let people make pilgrimages to the fridge for a dollar, as it wasn't bleeding for the world's sins after all. Kind of a letdown.

And that's what I do all day. The world I live in is a strange and confusing place, full of eldritch, unspeakable apparitions that turn out to be delicious frozen treats. And French people.