Here is a little story, the following events are all true.
Elliott and I had just moved in to our new place on Myrtle St. in Santa Cruz. Kane, our housemate had not yet moved in. Let me describe the house for it is a character unto itself. It was a little two story back house, built over a century ago. In front was a garden which had not been maintained since the original owners lived there. Bushes, trees, and vines had their way with the walkway and lattice work. The back was right up against a narrow, ancient alley, people occasionally walked through, leaving their empty beer cans and cigarette butts along the way. When you entered the house you were met with the smell of a hundred previous residents. The odors of every meal ever cooked in the little kitchen stuck to the walls and carpets and united to give it its unique flavor. The walls creaked and moaned with any movement. When you looked at the door jams long enough you realized they were all crooked, built at slight angles. There was a downstairs bedroom and a loft upstairs, Elliott and I lived upstairs. So much architecture was crammed into such a tiny space that there was a blind corner every few feet, going down the stairs, to the right, further around to the right, and to the bathroom. I soon learned that during the day the place was quaint, at night it was something slightly more than creepy.
Less than a week after we moved in Elliott went on a vacation with his family, leaving me alone for a week. The summer was winding down, school would startup soon and I must say, I enjoyed the peace and quiet, during the day that is. At night I was on edge. Every creak of the stairs, every unexplained shadow strained my eyes and perked up my ears.
It was on such a night when it happened. I was in the bathroom and something caught my eye in the bathtub. The tub, which was a free standing, legged antique, sat right under an eye level window which opened onto the alley. Inside the tub sat about seven little spheres of a dough-like substance. They were white and about as big as a golf ball. My already stressed brain did not know how to handle this new information. I was sure that they were alien eggs. If you have seen half of the sci-fi movies I have, you know that nothing good could come of this. I looked up and saw that the window was open slightly, I slammed it shut and locked it. Not letting my eyes off my new visitors, I looked for something long to poke them. My heart was racing, my mind was racing faster, and I was sure that I had been propelled into a movie. I was hoping that this was a G or PG family film. If it were rated PG-13 or R, I was either going to die or have to defeat them and it as going to be violent. After poking one of them I found that my dough hypothesis was correct, they definitely had a dough-like consistency. I leaned down ever so cautiously to see if they smelled, they did indeed. They smelled just like pizza dough. Okay fine, so they aren’t alien eggs, they are little balls of a yeast based dough. The question still remained, what the fuck were they doing in my bathtub? And then I reminded myself not to curse, one more F-bomb and this would have to be PG-13. The next logical thought was that they were dropped in here by some kind of dough ball killer. This was his mark and I was sure to be his next victim. It was getting late and I was too tired to keep reeling over this so I closed the door, went upstairs, pulled the covers completely over my head and went to sleep.
I woke up the next morning grateful to be alive and wanting a logical explanation. When I looked into the tub I found that the balls had risen. This proved that they were indeed balls of dough, they were twice as big as the night before. Still careful not to touch them, I pried them off with the delicate, scientific, poking instrument: the stick, and put them in the trash. I concluded that someone must have been walking by in the alley and dropped them through the window. To this day I do not know why. I think about it from time to time and it still puzzles me.
