The Great Unexplained Orange Incident of 2009

The plate of orange peels has been on the lower shelf of the coffee table for a week now. I didn’t buy the orange. I didn’t eat the orange. I don’t even recognize the plate. Everyone else in the house denies their involvement. I’m dubbing it the Great Unexplained Orange Incident of 2009. What a way to end a decade. A mystery with no closure. Although, I suppose that most mysteries don’t lend themselves to closure based on the whims of our calendar system. If they did, that would be a mystery in of itself.

The orange is starting to whither. A strange quality of orange peels. I’ve rarely seen a rotten one. They tend to just shrivel until they’re golf ball, snake egg-sized. Old man testicles. The aroma from the coffee table is a sickly sweet smell. Just a hint of decay, but mostly that chemical citrus smell you get in citrus “based” cleaning products.

Here’s one theory I’ve been throwing around: there’s a ghost in our house. But that doesn’t make much sense. How, as a ghost, is your M.O. of haunting eating the fruit of the living. Some sort of poor soul that died choking on an orange seed? Is that even possible? In what conceivable way could a person die in which they would just eat fruit. You need something scary. Appropriately scary. A trail of water where no one has taken a shower. Windows rattling. Knives floating through the air. You’ve got to moan some. Stand in the middle of a field and stare at the distance forlorgnly.

I can’t believe I forgot how to spell forlornly. Awesome, got it right that time. At least if I died at this moment you wouldn’t find me haunting your bookcase, tearing out the F-section of the dictionaries. I could be the most boring ghost ever. That might be the most annoying afterlife I can think of. I would prefer everlasting torment over that.

So this orange. Disregarding the supernatural, I have to assume I’ve been lied to by my roommates, that or I’m experiencing extremely early onset Alzheimer’s. I hope it’s the lying. I can deal with others lying to me, but me lying to me, that would be upsetting. It’s the reason I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I prefer others to let me down, as opposed to letting myself down.