My home is a bungalow with three bedrooms and a single bathroom. 

A walking hallway forms a straight line through its bowels, connecting the living room with the corner guest room, and every single space in my house is occupied by something. A shag carpet, a queen bed, and an oaken nightstand furnish my bedroom, though I haven't seen the carpet in a number of years, what with my magazine collection, my computer circuits, my stained plates, dime store romance novels, and other appurtenances blanketing the floor. My bed is easier to locate, as its bulk protrudes from the assemblage like the backside of a subterranean beast, but everything else is a small section of a chaotic, homogeneous puzzle. 

Likewise with my other rooms. What used to be a guest room is now practically a 10 x 10 receptacle, whose contents I wish I could describe for the reader; but each item therein is unique enough and unrecognizable enough to defy categorization. I stopped using it some years ago, when it became stuffed to its capacity with used articles, but sometimes I pass by the door, and a horrible death miasma wafts from within, and I wonder what unspeakable process of purification must be taking place.  

My music room is perhaps the most uniform of all my spaces, because it's composed mostly of sound equipment--some speakers from the 90's, a Kurzweil keyboard, tangles of quarter inch cables and other miscellaneous wires, mounting frames, guitar strings, reel-to-reels, mixing boards. Otherwise, I don't bother designating certain spaces for certain things. My living room is just as much a kitchen as my kitchen is a living room. Barring the waste receptacle, my bathroom is just as much a bedroom as my bedroom is a bathroom. And so on. 

As you might imagine, my home has adopted a certain organized chaos, manifesting naturalistic patterns akin to mother nature's finger prints. I'm talking accidents which proliferate into volition. Subconscious habits which manifest into physical patterns. A discerning investigator could probably discover which hobbies I've adopted and which canned foods I've consumed at any given time by digging through the layers of my debris and applying the carbon dating method. 

I'm describing the idiosyncrasies of our setting, because I need the reader to understand my unique problem. Though my lifestyle allows for plenty of conveniences, it's also created an advantageous landscape for small intruders--plenty of makeshift canopies and apertures to scurry beneath. 

Before the fumes killed-off most of the wildlife, a family of mice settled in my living room and began scavenging my left-overs, carrying my paper plates away and discarding their nibbled scraps in unsightly places. The droppings were disagreeable too. Sometimes I'd hunt through the debris and find them clinging to my possessions like little black beetles. No matter how I searched, I could never locate the damned things. Not their homes. Certainly not the mice themselves. 

Sometimes I'd see a section of my discarded paper buckle and hear scurrying and scratching, and I'd leap from my easy chair and stomp around my rubbish piles like an enraged Hopak dancer; but I never met any of my marks (I'm ninety percent sure). That's the problem with living in a house with plenty of hiding places--life can proliferate without your knowledge. 

Which is why the first manifestation made me feel so uneasy. 

A week later, against my better judgment, I reopened the refrigerator door and spotted an aberration. For the most part, the pickle loaf sandwich sat just as I had left it. The meat protruded from its slit like the lolling tongue of a dead animal. The nibble mark retained its caste. Even the top slice still bore the three round craters where my fingers had gripped it. But the top corner opposite my bite had begun to change color. 

It was only a blotch, an island of indigo barely larger than a finger print, nothing out of the ordinary given the bread's direct exposure to the moist air; but it still prodded my apprehension. I shut the door quickly.

Another week passed. I tried to occupy  my mind with distractions. On a whim, I decided to rearrange the music room. 

I began by relocating the nest of cables from their perch atop my Kurzweil keyboard, which was lying on the metal frame intended for the mixing board, but I had no proper location to place the Kurzweil once I had removed it, so I balanced it against a leaning stack of boards--a precarious arrangement, I see in retrospect--and lifted the metal frame, and then I couldn't shift it into its standing position because I'd forgotten how, and then the Kurzweil slipped from its perch and clobbered the wood-pannelled wall--kablam!--and I flew into a fit of rage. 

I snatched up the morass of black cords, reasoning that I could best sort them out by hurling them back and forth--smack!, kablam!, kablooey!--but my temper tantrum only tangled them up worse. So the music room ended up in a state similar to how it began, save some overturned speakers, a prostrate keyboard, and a nest of cords so knotted, God himself couldn't unsnarl them. A good day's work, I decided. 

So I gave up and opened the refrigerator door; and this time, the change was striking, disturbing even. What had been a blue stain was now a velutinous carpet of mold, coating every inch of the top slice. It was multicolored, proliferating into patches of indigo, jade, yellow; a beautiful, terrible transfiguration of the color spectrum. Were it not for the entity's uncanny location atop a common sandwich, I might've found it beautiful. 

But I'm a firm believer that context is important when judging the value of a thing. After all, the most alluring angel is the devil in disguise. I shut the door and tried not to think about it. But five minutes later, I hurried back into the kitchen and hunted around the counter for the cellophane scraps, exhuming the largest fragment which still contained the "Nutrition Facts." I parsed through the ingredients, and they read:

"Mechanically Separated Chicken, Pork, Water, Sweet Pickle (Cucumbers, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Salt, Distilled Vinegar, Water, Flavor, Sugar, Alum, Oleoresin Turmeric), Corn Syrup, Modified Corn Starch, Pimientos, Salt, contains less than 2% of Flavor, Dextrose, Sodium Phosphate, Sodium Propionate, Sodium." 

Nothing out of the ordinary. And that's what bothered me. I'd witnessed rotting food before. I'd seen how quickly bacteria grows on an ordinary slab of meat--nothing like the tumor splayed out before me. Normal ingredients shouldn't so quickly exhibit abnormal behavior. So I began to consider the preternatural again. I thought back to the horrible sinking feeling in my stomach two weeks earlier and wondered if I'd experienced more than a simple fit. Had I glimpsed the truth? I wondered. Had the pickle loaf's facade cracked for a brief moment, long enough for me to perceive its sinister composition?

I made a mistake then. I chose to ignore it. A common pastime of mine. Instead of removing the pickle loaf and discarding it far away, I chose to bury it. I closed the door. The rubber trimmings fastened themselves to the frame, isolating everything within. And that was that. I resolved never to visit my fridge again, let it rust in the corner of my kitchen and become another forgotten item in my backdrop. 

If I could turn back time and revise just one moment, I'd choose this one, the most cataclysmic of all my blunders.