Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

I was in the kitchen today and I noticed a thin cupboard door I’d never opened before. This isn’t the start of a fantastical piece of fiction where I opened the door and found a portal to a world I’d actually like to live in. It was literally a cupboard door I’d never opened. One of those thin ones that holds things like baking pans. 

This thin cupboard door was all the way on the end of a row of cabinets where the kitchen transitions into the dining room, and the cupboard angled into that transition at 45 about degrees. I guess I say “angled” because then maybe you could understand how I missed it—like it was hiding itself from me by being at an angle, and therefore was easily overlooked. But the truth is that I have lived in this home for nearly 4 years, and I can see that cupboard door plain as day from a spot on the couch where I spend a good portion of my time. There is no way I hadn’t seen it. I just hadn’t opened it. Today I opened it. 

And do you know what was inside? Inside was an area large enough to contain more than 500 packets, each with 50 one-hundred dollar bills—more than $2,500,000. But that’s not what was in there. Inside were just two metal shelf inserts for the microwave, because who needs shelves for the microwave?

I was absolutely dumbfounded. I went back to my spot on the couch and looked at that cupboard and tried to figure out how this could have happened. I consider myself an observant person. It’s part of my job as a writer to notice things, to pick up on details, to keep it interesting. But this is a stone-cold truth: I’d never seen those microwave shelves before in my life. 

What led me there in the first place was that I was down on the floor cleaning a spot just below that cupboard door and there was a spider web anchored to it, so I opened the door to make sure I’d gotten it all. That was when the shock came. I threw away the dirty paper towel and walked over to the couch and stared at that door and wondered if everything I thought I knew about the world might be wrong. I texted some friends. My friend Joel said I should immediately post something about it on Facebook. Marcus suggested that this situation would be a great blog topic. I replied that that sort of thinking is exactly why my blog is so well-read. 

But it did make me think: what if it had been a portal, maybe not to another world but instead, to say… a bar in Texas. And I could pop on through and have a couple beers and call my friend Joel to come have some beers, because he lives in Texas, and wouldn’t that be great? And then I’d pop on home. Out of that little door. 

But then I got up and checked and there’s no way in hell I would fit, because I’m not a baking pan, or a microwave shelf, and I’m too fat, and that’s not the world we live in. We live in a far more terrible world where things that should be magic end up being small cupboards we’ve never noticed filled with stuff we don’t care about. 

And so I started to feel betrayed by that cupboard for being a stupid ordinary cupboard, and I vowed never to put anything in there. No baking pans. No packets of money. Nothing. Just those microwave shelves. They’ll be there when I sell this house in 10 or 30 years, and the next guy can find them, and by then the microwave will certainly have been replaced. 

So he’ll open that little door and then go sit on the couch and wonder why the microwave shelves don’t fit the current microwave, and where the shelves are for the current microwave: why are the old ones still around, but the new ones aren’t? And do you know why? Because when that microwave conks out and I get a new one, the first thing I’m going to do is throw those shelves away.