The Pimento

by Susan L. Lin 

Damien Hsieh was in the kitchen when his refrigerator alerted him to the distressing reality that the world as he knew it would be ending in approximately twenty-four hours. He’d left his phone charging on the bedside table. He’d gone downstairs to pour himself a glass of sparkling water. He’d just been about to open the refrigerator’s French doors when the notification came in, accompanied by an obnoxious alarm that was several decibels too loud. He spent a few agonizing seconds assaulting random areas of the touchscreen with his hitchhiker’s thumb, unable to find a button that would turn down the volume. He hadn’t even known his refrigerator was capable of making such sounds. An unnerving cluster of words flashed in perfect time with the deafening distress signal.

Global News Bulletin: Extinction-level event imminent. Do not panic.

Damien stared dumbfounded at the display, momentarily befuddled by the statements and their close proximity to one another. Surely those last two phrases did not coexist in nature. Surely this was all a terrible mistake. Eventually, he collected his bearings enough to swipe left and read more. The cumbersome box of chilly air went quiet at last.

Numbness set in as Damien absorbed what the experts were saying, though a lot of it made no sense to him. Science had never been his strong suit. Apparently, the prehistoric creatures that still lived within the depths of the ocean were taking back control of the planet. They had banded together with a plan to flood every single piece of land on Earth. All species without the ability to breathe underwater were more or less screwed. The only reason humans had any warning at all was because of recent “unusual” behavior from animals in aquariums all over the world. No elaboration on what that behavior had entailed.

This had to be some kind of joke, Damien thought. He’d never been terribly fond of living. He’d long suspected he wasn’t very good at it. But he had been content this past year, and the news would alter his plans considerably. He would probably need something stronger than sparkling water to last the night.

Damien went to the grocery store expecting chaos, which was exactly what he found there. He’d barely taken two steps inside when he walked right back out. He didn’t even give the automatic doors enough time to close.

He didn’t do parties, but nevertheless, he found himself at a party.

The festivities were taking place at a palatial home with a large pond in the middle of the foyer. A handful of koi were swimming innocently around in the water like they didn’t have a care in the world. Damien fixed them with a suspicious, disapproving look as he came in through the front door. But they kept swimming, pretended not to notice him.

Meanwhile, every human at the house that night seemed to be checking items off mental bucket lists. They were organizing orgies in the master bedroom. They were partaking in a laundry list of drugs in the bathroom. They were preparing elaborate last meals at a long table in the dining room. They were singing mournful songs about dying in the center of the living room.

Damien settled in the kitchen, more interested in what could be hiding away inside the refrigerator than in the action unfolding elsewhere in the house. A bystander might have assumed that he was hungry, but his empty stomach wasn’t any motivation. The coffee table in front of the leather couch was already lined with countless finger foods, intricate arrangements on microwave-safe plates. The real reason for Damien’s retreat to the kitchen was the siren call of the refrigerator’s motorized hum. Damien had always found a person’s fridge to be far more intriguing than their sock drawer. Contrary to popular belief, intimates and foot stockings explained nothing of the world. The nourishment a person routinely put into their bodies said more about their life than the color and style of their hosiery.

Even Damien wasn’t sure when his obsession first took root. Ever since he could remember, he’d been a predictable type of person. As in, he’d always preferred closure to loose ends. As in, he’d always been the one to shut the kitchen cabinets when everybody else left them hanging open like gaping mouths, ready to devour anything in sight. He did it for the same reason that he hated books with ambiguous endings or television episodes that ended on a cliffhanger, all the major conflicts left unresolved. When he’d gone to parties as a teenager—the kind where no one knew half the people there but didn’t even care, the kind where the music was so loud you could never hear your own voice—he’d watched in dismay as girls opened drawers in search of pens or rubber bands or, hell, he didn’t know what they were looking for. He had never understood girls. They were always giggling and squealing, shrieking about how cute inanimate objects were with voices at least two notches too high, and why was it that they were incapable of going anywhere alone? He’d bit his tongue until it bled when they inevitably left the drawers open, when they let out unintelligible screams in perfect unison at some unknown source of excitement across the room. They would drop everything else at the sight of it and make a beeline for an unknown destination.

He couldn’t pinpoint the exact night he began peering into refrigerators like a peeping Tom gazing into a neighbor’s window. At first, he had thought he started doing it because he was bored, and besides that he could never figure out what to do with his hands. They’d always seemed awkward in his pockets because his arms were too long for his torso, and when he crossed them across his chest he felt tangled up in a knot, like a gigantic pretzel that hadn’t baked properly in the oven. He couldn’t just walk around with a drink in his hands all the time because then he would have been gulping from it all night and the line for the bathroom was…well, it hadn’t ever existed. Instead, the mass of waiting people had usually been more of a chaotic mob, all sweaty bodies and a sea of heads, arms gesticulating wildly and dark liquid sloshing in plastic cups. He hadn’t felt right pissing in the rose bushes out front any more than he did leaving drawers open.

Sometimes people even left the fridge door hanging wide open at the hinge, and that he didn’t get at all because didn’t anyone understand they were letting all the cold air out? Maybe that’s when it began. Because no one else seemed to care, because they were all ignoring the open fridge—and maybe they were enjoying the icy affair, he didn’t know. All the clustered body heat had been making the house unbearably stuffy; that much was true. The point is he’d been reaching out to close the fridge one night when he surveyed the contents inside and realized he could make up a whole story just from one shelf alone—a story that would finish properly, with periods at the end of sentences so they didn’t run on and on, the words overflowing beyond the line.

The end-of-the-world party was taking place in a mansion populated with designer furniture and cabinets overflowing with collectibles, but curiously the fridge in the kitchen was the old-school kind with the separate freezer on top. It didn’t even come with an external ice dispenser. Damien was poking around inside like he usually did when he spotted a jar of cloudy brine with a lone olive floating inside. Dumbstruck, he stood before the wide-open refrigerator door like a hypocrite, staring at the jar as if it contained secrets of the universe, when suddenly he remembered his old trombone teacher who lived across the street from the house he grew up in. He hadn’t thought about her in years.

In the beginning he hadn’t really wanted to learn the trombone; percussion was really more his thing, and besides that the thought of people putting their mouths on brass instruments day after day had never seemed very sanitary to him, even when he was a kid. But his mother didn’t seem to care about that: “Child, if you think I’ve got time to drive you across town every weekend just so you can bang on some drums and drive me and Daddy crazy with the noise, you’ve gone and lost your mind. Mrs. Rogers lives right across the street and she teaches trombone!”

So that was how he found himself at the old woman’s house, with a shiny new brass instrument from the biggest music store in town: Trombones, Trumpets, and Triangles, Oh My! As it turned out, Mrs. Rogers was a decent teacher, if a bit eccentric. On a particularly hot day, while he was trying—probably unsuccessfully—to coax a quasi-pleasant sound from his poor trombone, she suddenly brightened and asked, “Would you like to see my pet turtle?” Happy for any distraction from the instrument at hand, he nodded and set the unwieldy monster of a thing down gently in its case. Mrs. Rogers led him through an unfamiliar hallway before opening a door to the garage. “You keep him out here?” he asked. “Doesn’t it get too hot?”  The woman said nothing, just continued walking towards an old, avocado-green refrigerator in the corner. She opened the freezer door and retrieved a miniature, label-less jar. “Look at him, isn’t he cute?”  She held the jar closer to his face so he could see. Sure enough, there was a turtle inside the jar. A baby turtle; it was so small. He noticed the red spots on both sides of its head, just like the turtles he had seen swimming in tanks at the pet store. But this turtle was pale and shriveled, and it obviously wasn’t swimming around. It was dead. “So, what do you think?” Mrs. Rogers asked, still in that pleasant voice of hers, as she put the jar back in the freezer and shut the door. She looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re right,” little Damien swallowed, “he is cute. Very cute.”

So maybe the refrigerator thing had actually started way back then. Big Damien thought about it some more that night as he chewed on the olive and watched a television broadcast of water from the world’s oceans rushing onto every last shore, reporters in scuba-diving gear doing their best to stay afloat. He had always loved olives, and he was kind of sad now that he had eaten the last one. The pimento was his favorite part.