Saturday, May 14, 2005

Cleaning the Room

By the end of the year, our room had become the largest landfill in a twenty mile radius. T-shirts, jackets, jeans, soiled panties (yes, we had frequent guests in our room), shoes, socks, fluff, large packets of cereal stolen from the dining hall kitchens, several empty bottles of Jack Daniels, junk mail, midterm papers, we had everything in our closet. Only regular sprays of room freshener had kept the room livable. Then on the eve of our departure as James and I began cleaning the room, we found Jeremiah.

After clearing of the top layer of junk and clothing with nostalgia, we found a bearded face amidst our clothing. In the bad light I thought it was probably a left over mask from Halloween, but as we dug deeper we found a couple of hands, a torso and even two legs and lo, there was Jeremiah!

James was the first to recover from the shock as he tried, much to Jeremiah’s dismay, to pull Jeremiah out of the closet. He looked like a chipped version of John Cleese on crack with a crazy thick beard and unkempt hair and a tattered jacket that smelt like sewage pipes. The worst part was we had never met this person before.

“Who the fuck are you? What the fuck are you doing in our closet?” James asked.

Still shielding his eyes from the light of our bedroom, the man managed to murmur “Jeremiah”. That’s how we got to know his name.

Jeremiah had been living in our closet for the past three months without our knowledge, underneath our heap of clothes and junk. He had been feeding off all the food that’s usually strewn about the room after a good raid at the dining hall kitchens…I don’t have anything to say, nothing, I’m still recovering. Gives a whole new meaning to ‘what lies beneath’ doesn’t it?

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