The Seldom-Opened Cupboard

Category: Humorous Prose

Journal: The Post-It Note Passages

Date: 9-18-2011

The Seldom-Opened Cupboard

by Felina Lune Kavi

"What's this?" Michael wondered.

We realized if he didn't know what mystery food was lurking within the Quik Trip sack above the microwave, nobody would. This may have been hidden for quite some time. The cupboard was embarrassingly inconvenient to short people; a clever concealer for the treasures of a giant.

Both of us grimaced at the thought of it.

I uttered an involuntary "Ewwwww!" toward the sack.

He grabbed it, carefully, as it could have contained a slumbering monster for all he could remember.

"Ew, indeed." He agreed as he fondled the sack. "I think it was some kind of...donut thing." He offered as an apologetic suggestion.

"Gross!" I cringed with disapproval and astonishment. I couldn't help but cover my mouth and back away in horror, as if the decaying donut creature would hurl itself out of the sack and into my gaping mouth.

"This can't be good." He stated the obvious as he pondered his next course of action.

"That's probably been there forever!" I laughed nervously. "What the heck is it?! It had to have been yours!"

"I don't know. Donuts...maybe? Or a cookie and sumthin?" He brought it to the trash to put it out of its misery.

Hovering over the opened can like a ghost with a message for the man who killed him, the mystery begged us to be solved.

My husband looked to me. "Do I do it?"

"Ugh...I guess." I admitted. "I kinda want to know what's in there."

He opened it quickly, like a band-aid pulling hairs all at once.

I gave him a moment while he gazed into the sack in disgust.

I, too, peered into the plastic abyss, like a passerby at the scene of a crime she had no fault in. The white, sticky ooze of an iced chocolate donut had mated with a mushy old bearclaw in captivity and created a disgusting bastard of a deformed pastry.

"Ewwwww!" We both vomited out the word in unison as we simultaneously smelled the aged, doughy consummation in which it was left to stew.

He quickly wrapped it back up and dumped it in the trash, hoping that would be the end of that nightmare. But a wife becomes a master at poking at her husband's follies, and I was not to be denied a chance to voice my deductions once discovered.

"You hid it up there so no one would find it and then you forgot it!" I mocked triumphantly. "You ARE a Squirrel!"

And so it was that my husband's Squirrel Totem had taught him a valuable lesson.