The infamous Xopl dot com.

artichoke heart of darkness

<< Feb 14, 2005 @ 04:34 >>

I was facing aisle seven when I discovered it, and before I provide you with the details of my discovery, the details of which you are no doubt in a current state of curiosity regarding, I should warn you that your eagerness betrays you. If I could go back to before I discovered it, I would. I would forget it all happened quite happily, but alas, the experience will with me linger, forever. Do not take my warnings lightly. You may ask why I should even offer you the opportunity to read, when I would so forwardly dispatch my memory of the discovery myself. Knowing you would have this question, I have prepared my response. I wish I could tell you my motivations were of good will. Before my discovery, I liked to believe I was a person of good intentions. Now though, my previous positivity has rendered in me a kind of honesty manifesting here as my compulsion to both warn you to not read any further, and to tell you that my motivations, should you ignore my desperation and continue, are completely selfish. I hope to lessen my own suffering in my discovery by perhaps passing some of the weight on to you. I really wish I could tell you my cause was not so sinister, but then again, you were not the one who was burdened with this discovery in the first place. With that said, I will proceed. Read on, at your own peril.

Having faced aisles four through six already, and having finished my second break of the evening, I returned to the grocery floor and began to face aisle seven. I started on the side containing the extent of the store's collection of pasta sauces. I faced puttanesca, I faced arrabiata, I faced meat and marinara. About half-way through the Prego sauces, I reached in and pulled forward a jar of garlic and onion flavoured sauce when I noticed a wet spot on the cardboard below. What's more, a black fibrous structure, a nappy, soggy mess, every bit as dark and terrible as one could imagine hair would be if it grew on the Devil himself, was affixed to the cardboard wherever it was wet. This was bad, but what came next was worse.

I saw then what no grocer ever wants to see. A lone jar, back deep in the shadows of the shelf, was sitting half empty in another row, on an adjacent piece of cardboard. My pulse slowed as the meaning sank in.

I began to exhume the unfull jar from it's moist tomb. With each intact jar I removed to gain distance toward my doom, the reality of the horror I had discovered grew deeper, thicker... wetter.

This piece of cardboard did not have a damp spot, but instead was soaked through entirely. At any distance past the immediate front row of jars, a thick black tangle grew. Entering into the second row of jars, to reach the unfull-one in the third, the fur no longer grew on the spongy cardboard substrate, but instead well beyond the surface of the original paper on top of a thick, creamy white substance, not dissimilar from a bisected cup of yogurt, which was easily an inch deep. I removed each still-filled jar and set it upon the floor below; leaving behind a marshy, circular void in the increasingly deep white mold-paste and carrying with some fungus by glass bonded transport.

And each separate fungus fibre brought its spores upon the floor.