No tags yet.
My sophomore year of college I lived in a dormitory away from most of my friends, who all lived together at the bottom of the hill. Living at the top of the hill, even though my roommate and I got along really well, I sometimes got a bit lonely and chose to wallow at my computer with a coloring book rather than walk down to the student center to have dinner with the group. Or sometimes I would not want to eat at the same clockwork time that the big group did, but did not want to eat alone. Anyway, I kept a small stash of cup ramen noodles and things around for times like this, although I did not stock it regularly.
On one such night, I was down to my last chicken ramen cup noodle. I took it to the communal floor kitchen, through it in the microwave for 3 minutes, and waited. As I took it out, I realized that it was very, very light. Looking in, I discovered that I had completely forgotten to fill the cup to the line with water. For a moment I just stared at the slightly burnt looking noodles in horror. Would they cook properly now that I had blasted them dry in the microwave. Well, even if they were not perfect, they would have to do because my only other option was to get myself put together and leave the building for dinner. I decided to see if I could salvage the situation, so I filled the cup with water and put it back in the microwave.
Taking the noodles out, they looked a bit weird and stiff, but mostly okay. I set the cup down on the counter and pulled out my chopsticks to stir the noodles around. There were definitely a few noodles with burned sides or stiff bits, but really they looked okay. Then I started stirring and mixing the noodles with the soup. My chopsticks knocked against something. Puzzled, I felt around again, and there it was again. There was something in my noodles! Reaching in with the chopsticks, I pulled out whatever it was to look at.
Clamped between my chopsticks was a horrible, pitch black mass the size of a golf ball with lots of noodle tentacles hanging off it. For a split second I stared at this abomination, and my stomach churned with disgust, then I quickly hid the thing back under the rest of the noodles. Seizing the cup, I cast it into the trash can, and power walked out of the kitchen and back to my room. For several minutes I sat at my desk shuddering, thinking of the twisted, charred, alien egg I had accidentally created in the microwave. I reminded myself that things could always be worse, like the time my dad found a cooked centipede in his morning coffee, but something about that black mass had truly disturbed me.
Before long, however, I once again began to wonder what I was going to eat for dinner.
