Slimy Bones
Alison Jameson
It was a typical Wednesday and the school bellswere ringing for lunch to commence. My friends and I all gatheredtogether and after three minutes of light quarreling we concludedthat Taco Bell would be the destination of choice for lunch. Wearrived and ordered, each of my friends ordering overcooked meatymorsels, and I ordering a safe, flesh-free, seven-layer burrito.School lunch lasted thirty minutes and because we had chosen theslowest fast food restaurant in town, we had to rush back to schoolwith our uneaten grub in our hands.
We arrived back and dispersed into our differentfour-walled asylum-like classrooms to eat our lunch. I rippedinto my burrito with uncontrollable hunger, inhaling the tortilla-wrappedconcoction so quickly that I was unable to savor its flavor. Midwaythrough the seven-layer wonder I was abruptly interrupted whenI bit into a solid fragment of my food. Unable to chew throughthe morsel, and uninterested in doing so, I spit the foreign objectinto my hand to familiarize myself with its content. Out it came:a fuzzy slimy, malachite green, long and hard substance. Uponfurther investigation I realized that I had bitten into a halfwaydecomposed bone.
Up until this moment I had been sitting quietlyin a stagnant history course, but at the time of my discoverymy stomach began to rage and I jumped from my seat and ran acrossthe room and into the hallway. I instantaneously evacuated theeaten portion of the burrito, and some of my earlier breakfast,from my body and into the nearest waste receptacle. Once my convulsionsstabilized, I was able to go to a restroom where I spent the remainderof the day.
Since this traumatic food experience, I havefound myself dissecting everything that has been prepared by asecond party, even frozen tv dinners. It is bewildering how onesickening food incident have lead to multiple abnormal eatingrituals. These rituals include cutting wrapped foods into tinypieces, stirring beans and pasta in search of foreign objects,and taking entire sandwiches apart and reassembling them. My slimybone experience has shaped my phobia of food into what it is today.