Of Mice and Lunch

My roommate has a beloved pet snake, Larry. Don’t get me wrong, Larry is sweet (for a snake) but his food makes me queasy. My roommate regularly buys dead mice for Larry, which he stores in the refrigerator. These mice horrify me. They horrify me so much I have made my roommate keep them in a brown bag, so I’m not forced to ever look at them.

One day, while running late for work, I grabbed my lunch and hopping into my car. At work, I threw my lunch into the fridge where I didn’t touch it until my lunch break. This particular day, I was eating lunch alone with a woman who worked in the coffee shop next to our building. We had been chatting lately, and we wanted to get to know each other. Her name was Jenny, and I had been admiring her from afar for a while. It had taken weeks for me to get the courage to ask her to eat lunch with me alone.

So we sat down to our lunch, and I reached into my bag. My hand wrapped around something furry. I froze. Many thoughts went through my head, and I began to pray that I was touching mold as I carefully looked into the bag. My jaw dropped and I felt my stomach flip.

‘What is it?’ Jenny asked, sure I was kidding around. Before I could stop her, she peered into the bag and shrieked. And I mean shrieked. Several coworkers ran in, sure we had been mugged or attacked.

Instead, they saw Jenny throw the bag away, spilling three dead mice across the floor. All of my coworkers jumped away, staring from me to the mice. I was mortified. I tried to explain, but everyone was talking so fast.

‘They’re for Larry!’ I shouted, as if that explained anything.

‘Who is Larry and why is he eating dead mice?’ Jenny asked, horrified.

It took several more tries before I was able to clearly explain that Larry was my roommate’s pet snake. Thankfully, after much explanation, everyone understood how I had made the mistake of taking Larry’s mice and leaving my lunch at home.

That day, I went home and told my roommate what had happened. He spent a good hour laughing. ‘Why don’t you get a clear lunchbox?’ he asked me as a joke.

But I realized that that was a genius solution, and went online, where I found The Clear Bag Store. There I ordered two clear lunch boxes so that I will never again make the mistake of taking dead mice as my lunch.

My coworkers still give me a hard time about that day, but all in good fun. One coworker tried to sneak a fake mouse into my lunch box, but I saw it through the clear plastic sides. As for Jenny, she understood my predicament, but said she probably wouldn’t be eating food from my fridge for a while.