Bugs, Bugs, Everywhere (Including Some I Ate?)

6-1675-goldfish-1337785358

Day 13 of my 30-day writing challenge

(Warning: There really are a lot of bugs in this story. It might not agree with everyone, particularly those who don’t share my bizarre sense of humor.)

Either I’ve caught the bug my husband had last week, or it was a terrible idea to add expired coconut milk to my chai tea last night. I suspect it was both.

To say the coconut milk was older than it should have been is an understatement akin to saying that the Hindenburg flight could maybe have gone a little better. But it smelled and tasted fine, and wasn’t clumpy, and I guess I thought, “It’s plant-based; how bad can it be? It’s not like I’m eating expired pork.”

Now that I’ve spent the day feeling like someone filled my stomach with slime mold, gave it to a shrieking troop of baboons to Riverdance on, then passed it to a sadistically grinning donkey who used it for rugby before sitting on it out of sheer spite, I am reconsidering my views on the superior qualities of vegan food products.

Although almond milk is one of the only two things that have stayed down today.

The other one is Flavor Blasted Xtra Cheddar Goldfish crackers. Because nothing soothes the digestive system like powdered cheese.

I also tried to eat raisins. That was going fair to middling before I realized that my ziplocked bag had somehow been infested by bugs about the size and shape of magnet filings. I thought they might be fruit fly larvae, but a Google image search doesn’t seem to bear that out.

I don’t think I ate any of whatever those bugs were, but if I did, my stomach didn’t give me a chance to digest them.

This is not close to the worst experience I have had with creepy crawlies. The worst was walking into my kitchen first thing on a dim morning years ago, holding the baby, and stepping on what appeared to be grains of rice completely covering the floor. It was mystifying – up until the point that I realized they were writhing. At that point, I bolted for the kitchen light and my shoes, put down the baby in the other room, grabbed a vacuum cleaner with a tube attachment, and starting suctioning a swathe through the biggest, grossest infestation of maggots I have ever seen. And let me tell you: Being eyeless and legless does not slow those buggers down. They roll around like ball bearings greased with Crisco.

I still don’t know how this happened. I’m not the best of housekeepers (as can be seen at multiple places in this post alone), but even I would have noticed a rotting carcass in my kitchen. I did find a ton of maggots on the windowsill, unconcernedly scooting themselves off the edge to join the disco party on the floor. Maybe they blew in on the East Wind?