In today’s installment of Carol Burnett as Nancy Drew, I’m up in my room folding clothes, alone in the house, when I hear this really loud, eerie, staticky noise that sounds exactly, EXACTLY like a walkie talkie emanating from a satchel bag on the floor in the corner. This is the bag I use to tote around my books and laptop, a bag no one else ever touches. I know there are no electronics inside, but still I double-check that my computer’s on the desk and phone’s on the bedside table. And because everything’s scarier in an empty house, it feels like a horror movie as I edge, against my better judgment, toward the bag, creeping up on it as if it’s white-flecked and rabid. Crossing the room, I grapple with the certainty that someone is listening, tapping, spying, planting surveillance equipment throughout the house. Sinister humans in sunglasses, or possibly some sort of alien surveillance. Or it could be a bomb. Lots of nuts out there waiting for the right time to take down a middle-aged American housewife folding clothes. You can’t say for sure.
I reach gingerly into the bag, eyes asquint, teeth gritted, face cringing, body half-turned to deflect the impact, and pull out…a half-drunk Arden’s Garden juice, bloated like a drowned corpse, probably around 2 weeks past expiration. I lift it up to the light, peering and bewildered as the plastic container chatters back at me, whistling and crackling and screeching white noise like a radio turned up full-volume, dial stuck b/t stations. As I’m trying to process this animated inanimateness, the bottle explodes all over me, raining down pungent strings of rotting citrus punctuated by the occasional clump of coagulated furry brown mold spores. The smell, never again to leave my bag, nose, or hands, is reminiscent of a pair of sweaty athletic socks, balled up and discarded after a particularly humid summer soccer practice, soaked in a stagnant drainage ditch, and left to fester in a mothball-filled car trunk for several weeks.
I’m still swiping at fruit flies in my bathroom, but I think I’ve finally solved “The Mystery of the No-Drink Rule at Airport Security”. That shit is dangerous.
