The Plainclothes Clown

This morning, I was prepping some food, and I needed some sauce to put on my pitta bread and bit of a brunch. There was a long, thin-necked bottle of some sort of orange sauce in the back on the fridge, so on a whim I took it out and opened it to see what it would taste like.

What happened next was completely unexpected.

First, the bottle hissed as I unscrewed the lid, like a pop bottle. Next, when I looked down the neck of the bottle, I saw a thick cloud of grey vapour rising from the inside of the bottle, like a puff of cigar smoke. It looked disgusting, and I would not have liked to have smelled it.

But worse was to come. Because behind that cloud of vapour the sauce itself came up to meet me, rising up through the long neck of the bottle, a bubbling, roiling column of yellow-orange foam with flecks of red, shooting out of the bottle and spilling all over everything.

Damn me if the whole bottle hadn't just fermented. What it smelled like, I couldn't hazard a guess. "Hazard" is probably right, as in "bio-hazard."