What is it? I ask myself. I stare at the small, square table in my apartment, or, more appropriately, at the small, Styrofoam box sitting there. The box, like most of the Styrofoam variety, is white. This one has a peculiar hole in one corner, like someone sanded the edge until a smooth gradient of a gash was created. The box was cold, as it had been in a refrigerator for the last two days, and smelled delicious, but the type of delicious where one could not discern any one ingredient. I thought back to when I first acquired the foam treasure chest, a simpler time . . .
I had just finished eating with my friend Cherry at a restaurant whose name I can neither pronounce nor remember. We had stopped there on our way back to our apartment building from Big C, the local supermarket. My daily decreasing funds due to frivolous living in a very small way (Thailand is extremely cheap, but you soon realize, after a certain matter of time, that you have to stop converting the costs to dollars and start living in baht; around the time I had this change of mind, I came to the conclusion that I did not have nearly as much money on the ready as I would have liked) and I decided that instead of eating out every day for lunch and dinner, I had better buy myself from food from the supermarket to save money and sustain life. So, dinner was finished and Cherry was showing me some pictures on her cell phone of some of the previous SMs to Thailand. The restaurant, a loud, bustling place, moved around us as we waited for the bill and looked at pictures. All of a sudden, I looked to my right and there sat a bag on our table.
To whom did the bag belong? We had eaten all of the food we had ordered, so that ruled us out. However, the bag of food was dropped off with such pink panther slyness that we never saw the individual who had set it on our table. My questions soon moved from the area of whom to the region of what. What was in the bag? I had to take a look. I opened the bag up, looked in the Styrofoam box (which didn't have a hole at this point) and was struck by a wave of warm delicious aromas. There were wide white noodles and cooked chicken and bright cabbage . . . on all accounts not a meal to be trifled with; and yet there it sat, on our table, unordered but not necessarily unwanted. Again I shot a look around the restaurant, trying to stop the Robin Hood who was aware of my baht predicament and had decided to remedy the problem with an anonymous gift of food from the rich, for this surely was rich person food.
The check came and many waiters and waitresses passed, but nobody took away the bag. Perhaps they had forgotten about it, perhaps they had not realized they had made the mistake in the first place; perhaps I was subconsciously putting out a very rough, "you'd better not take this bag away from me" aura; we will likely never know. What we do know is that I left the restaurant holding one more bag that night, and when I returned to my apartment, it went in my refrigerator, where it lied in wait, until lunch time today . . .
I had forgotten completely about the mystery dish. I was scouring my apartment for something to eat that didn't fall into my self-imposed soup diet (called into action as a result of my lack of funds) when I saw, in the back of my fridge, the bag. I placed it on the table and stared at it. What is it? And where the heck did that hole come from? At first I thought, naturally, that some sort of a mouse with a belt sander was living in my refrigerator, but I quickly tossed that idea out; how ridiculous, the idea that mouse would operate a belt sander in a refrigerator when it is obvious that it would need safety glasses and safety glasses of that size are, at this stage in history, simply out of the question. So I ignored the hole and looked into the box. I was reminded of why I had so eagerly taken this clerical cuisine error; it still smelled delicious. So I borrowed a refrigerator from the teacher across the hall (my "kitchen" did not come equipped with one) and heated the dish. I tore into it, the exact way in which you would expect someone who has not eaten solid food in two and a half days to do. It was delicious, of course, but the more I ate, the more the question gnawed at me: what is it?
To be honest, I never found out. But I'm pretty sure there was some squid or octopus in it. All I know is that the chewy, fish-tasting chunks had some pretty heavy-duty suckers on them. But the need to eat real food after that much soup does strange things to a person.
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