be careful putting things in storage in Vancouver
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Something Happened Inside an Innocuous Plastic Tub. A tub that contained only four things. Those things were my iron, my slippers, my alarm clock, and my box of matchbox cars. What happened? Well, I can only guess, but:
1) I can summarize that the slippers are now in a dumpster behind the apartment building because their consistency was no longer what you might call... slipper-y. They seemed to be a mass of something else.
I gingerly plucked one out of the tub and was horrified to discover that it felt not at all like knitted polyester yarn. It was squishy and soft, and disturbingly heavy. It was supposed to be a slipper, but it felt... well it felt like shit. I was the proud new owner of a pair of shitslippers.
2) The iron seems to have... sprouted. I'm not sure how to describe it. The teflon surface is all bubbled and messed up with something that seems to be midway in consistency, appearance, and colour between calcium deposits and merengue (it was the ex's iron and I'd intended on giving it back with the restof her stuff, whenever we finally arrange that).
3) The alarm clock, partially wrapped in one of the shitslippers, was fine.
4) The box of cars was a nightmare. It was like something from Alien. All twisted and covered with what might have been cocoons (this doubled my paranoia about the shitslippers) or mold or something. Something organic, anyway.
Inside - a place I was willing to avoid in the sake of Never Finding Out and No Longer Wanting Whatever Was Inside, but just had to see - I found my cars.
Out on the balcony, where an exodus of sightless invertibrates or pod spores or dried up maggots from an eight-month-old dead mouse couldn't further taint the apartment, I found my cars, mostly encased in whispy strands of cocoon/fungus. Mostly.
I have decided that despite its non-use and last-minute shaking-out, there may have been some water in the iron. Also, the slippers may have contained some pollen or mold (or insect eggs) on account of regularly being worn around the apartment while I was an unemployed bum in Vancouver. The relative mosture level inside the loosely-sealed tub, which may have been inside a box - and if so was completely sealed for those eight months because I taped every seam on every box knowing that the stuff would be there a while.
Or maybe the grains/eggs were inside the iron, too. I don't know. Yech.