The Herring Adventure

This is the story of one of the many times I attempt to feed myself and it goes catastrophically wrong.

So I wake up from about 13 hours of sleep, and I’m inevitably hungry. I try to put it off with generous amounts of carefully brewed coffee, and it doesn’t work, so I resort to trying to find edible leftovers in the fridge, which doesn’t turn out well since my mom’s storage system needs a deciphering manual. However, I manage to find two odd looking packaged herrings. And that’s where it all started.

I get out the plastic bag with a fish drawn on it, and it looks rather embossed. To my inexperienced self, I thought that’s just the packaging and when I open it there’ll pieces of herring carefully aligned to emboss the picture. I was horribly mistaken.

I open up the package only to be met with a horrifyingly whole and very alive looking fish, which sends my body into convulsions, reducing my powers of speech to variations of grurghrugheghurgheghgegh aaaaaa grrrghhhh.

I repeatedly try to approach it, but to no avail. To my vivid imagination and starving self, the thing was alive and almost moving. I had a corpse of a living thing lying on the counter and I had no means of removing it, putting it back or trying to turn it edible, and my toes had given up on their duty to keep my balance, since I’d been reduced to hopping around with my toes cramped into odd formations. It had eyes and fins and everything.

Since I could neither leave it there nor cook it without losing my motor functions, not to mention the fact that I had no idea as to how I’m supposed to cook it in the first place, my logic leads me to two things: a) There has to be pan and oil involved. b) There has to be instructions on the packaging.

So I hopped around, making sounds that, to a neighbour, would sound like I’m having my my joints popped out of their sockets in a medieval vice, and got a pan, filled it with oil, and held the packaging in midair with scissors in one hand and a towel in another. There were no instructions to be seen.

Being caught between a rock and a hard place, I get out of the kitchen and try to beg my sleeping dad to get up and remove the corpse, telling him I wasn’t hungry anymore. My efforts failed to penetrate his REM cycle. So I try to wake my mom up begging her to either get up and help me or tell me what to do, I managed to penetrate her REM cycle, but only enough to reach her subconscious. She mumbled something about leaving it there, no oil involved, defrosting and a vivid description of the cats she was dreaming of at the time.

So here I am, in the middle of the apartment, with a corpse in the kitchen and no idea how to dispose of it. I tried to summon the powers of Jack the Ripper and found his advice on the boiling point of human hearts of no help. After extended psychological turmoil, I decide to get myself together and brave through it on some sort of quest to prove to myself that I’m not a pussy, since there was no way I’m eating that thing if my life depended on it.

I go back into the kitchen, which activates another episode of me jumping around the place spewing jargon. I had the mental image of myself in a morgue identifying a deformed body, and found myself rather inclined towards that version of the plot than the one I currently had to deal with, for at least I’d have sufficient evidence in the latter plot that the subject is sufficiently dead.

It seemed perfectly logical at that point to stuff it into the microwave, since my knowledge about the whole cooking culture involves me stuffing things into the microwave, only to have the magical waves render the object suitable for human munching. There was of course the teeny tiny little problem of how I’m going to get the fish into the microwave without my having to touch it, keeping into consideration that telekinesis is not a valid option. Another one of the Indian rain dance episodes was initiated as I propped the thing with the longest ladle I could find onto a plate, with my heart halting to a temporary stop when it tumbled my way. With some ninja moves, I managed to balance it there, and shove it into the microwave, set it to a minute and run for my life.

The sounds and view of the fish moving in agony was plain torture, I felt like Neville when Mad Eye Moody performed the Cruciatus curse on that spider in front of him. Time was up and I got out from behind the doorframe where I’d hidden incase something exploded into a shower of fish guts.

Comparing the before and after, the fish looked like something out of a horror movie. It had curled upwards, its eyes popped out and there were juices oozing out of all sorts of perforations from its bloated body that seemed to lose length and gain width on some sort of deathly equation. The position of the fish on the plate looked as if I’ve been performing  an exorcism, and vaguely resembled this:

Another Indian rain dance later, I decided that I had to do this. I approached it, took a deep breath, positioned the scissors, closed my eyes and let out a yelp as I severed its poor head. I got a fork and knife and proceeded to surgically gut it into perfect little squares, removing what then appeared to be poo and was later identified as eggs, since in no way could a fish be this diarrheic without ingesting oodles of chocolate which I couldn’t possibly imagine finding its way to the ocean.

After the excruciating process, both to me and the poor creature, I got rid of the evidence with the precision of a serial killer and stuffed it in the fridge. I had to talk myself out of turning vegetarian for 2 hours afterwards, settled on not eating anything with a face for sometime and swore on everything holy that never, ever, for as long as I live, will I attempt to cook again.