HELL'S KITCHEN

It was exactly what you'd expect, I suppose, with two bachelor twenty-somethings living there.

I tried to keep the kitchen respectable, but every so often it would just get... disgusting. No dishwasher, and in fact I was the one who did the dishes about 90% of the time, so there was always a pile built up. You know how it goes, you don't wash until you need something, then you only wash what you needed. I was doing a lot of home cooking then, believe it or not, but that only made the dish situation worse.

Now it certainly wasn't our idea for the kitchen to be carpeted wall to wall, and it certainly wasn't a very good idea either. Something leaked from the bottom of the trash can and soaked into that part of the carpet. We really never figured out what it was or when it happened, just panicked when we found the fly larvae hatching in the carpet. Aww yeah.

A while later, I was cleaning the refrigerator (another event that didn't happen nearly often enough) and in the vegetable drawer I found one of those thin veggie bags from the supermarket, tied shut without a twistie as usual, full of... well, red liquid. Nothing solid at all, just this red fluid about the consistency of your average salad dressing.

I threw it away, then started trying to figure out just what it was we had bought that had disintegrated that way. No tomatoes, no red peppers, in fact we quickly determined it couldn't have actually been anything red at all to begin with. After a few days racking our brains for unused past vegetable purchases, we finally realized the only thing we couldn't account for was... a cucumber. Not exactly a red thing, but that was the only possible answer.

A few months after we'd settled into that, and begun to wonder just how a green cucumber could disintegrate into a red liquid, I found out. I was again cleaning the refrigerator and again found a disintegrating cucumber, but this one had only gone about halfway. Meaning it was partly covered in mold -- red mold, you got it -- and had partly turned to liquid.

I threw that one away too. We filed the whole experience away as a science lesson for the ages.

And we stopped buying cucumbers.