this story is about a fridge

the mail on the doormat consisted of the usual things: a rude letter threatening to take away his american express card, an invitation to apply for an american express card, and a few bills of the more hysterical and unrealistic type. he couldn't understand why they kept sending them. the cost of the postage seemed merely to be good money thrown after bad. he shook his head in wonderment at the malevolent incompetence of the world, threw the mail away, entered the kitchen and approached the fridge with caution.

it stood in the corner.

the kitchen was large and shrouded in a deep gloom that was not relieved, only turned yellow, by the action of switching on the light. dirk squatted down in front of the fridge and carefully examined the edge of the door. he found what he was looking for. in fact he found more than he was looking for.

near the bottom of the door, across the narrow gap that separated the door from the main body of the fridge, which held the strip of gray insulating rubber, lay a single human hair. it was stuck there with dried saliva. that he had expected. he had stuck it there himself three days earlier and had checked on it several occasions since then. what he had not expected to find was a second hair.

he frowned at it in alarm. a SECOND hair?

it was stuck across the gap in the same way as the first one, only this hair was near the top of the fridge door, and he had not put it there. he peered at it closely, and even went so far as to go and open the old shutters on the kitchen windows to let some extra light in upon the scene.

the daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of WHAT'S-ALL-THISing around the room, which, like the bedroom, would have presented anyone of an aesthetic disposition with difficulties. like most of the rooms in dirk's house it was large, looming, and utterly disheveled. it simply sneered at anyone's attempts to tidy it, sneered at them and brushed them aside like one of the small pile of dead and disheartened flies that lay beneath the window, on top of a pile of old pizza boxes.

the light revealed the second hair for what it was---gray at the root, the rest dyed a vivid metallic orange. dirk pursed his lips and thought very deeply. he didn't need to think hard in order to realize who the hair belonged to---there was only one person who regularly entered the kitched looking as if her head had been used for extracting metal oxides from industrial waste---but he did have seriously to consider the implications of the discovery that she had been plasstering her hair across the door of his fridge.

it meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and his cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening level. it was now, dirk reckoned, fully three months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them was grimly determined not to be the one to open it first. the fridge no longer merely stood there in the corner of the kitchen, it actually lurked. dirk quite clearly remember the day on which the thing had started lurking. it was about a week ago, when dirk had tried a simple subterfuge to trick elena---the old bat's name was elena, pronounced to rhyme with "cleaner," which was an irony that dirk now no longer relished---into opening the fridge door. the subterfuge had been deftly deflected and had nearly rebounded horribly on dirk.

he had resorted to the strategy of going to the local mini-market to buy a few simple groceries. nothing contentious---a little milk, some eggs, some bacon, a carton or two of chocolate custard and a simple half-pound of butter. he had left them, innocently, on top of the fridge as if to say, "oh, when you have a moment, perhaps you could pop these inside..."

when he had returned that evening his heart bounded to see that they were no longer on top of the fridge. they were gone! they had not been merely put aside or put on a shelf, they were nowhere to be seen. she must finally have capitulated and put them away. in the fridge. and she would surely have cleaned it out once it was actually open. for the first and only time his heart swelled with warmth and gratitude toward her, and he was about to fling open the door of the thing in relief and triumph when an eighth sense (at the last count, dirk reckoned he had eleven) warned him to be very, very careful, and to consider first where elena might have put the cleared-out contents of the fridge.

a nameless doubt gnawed his mind as he moved noiselessly toward the garbage bin beneath the sink. holding his breath, he opened the lid and looked.

there, nestling in the folds of the fresh black bin liner, were his eggs, his bacon, his chocolate custadd and his simple half-pound butter. two milk bottles stood rinsed and neatly lined up by the sink into which their contents had presumably been poured.

she had thrown it away. rather than open the fridge door, she had thrown his food away.

he looked around slowly at the grimy, squat white monolith, and that was the exact moment at which he realized without a doubt that his fridge had now begun seriously to lurk.

he made himself a stiff black coffee and sat, slightly trembling. he had not even looked directly at the sink, but he knew that he must unconsciously have noticed that two clean milk bottles there, and some busy part of his mind had been alarmed by them.

the next day he had explained all this away to himself. he was becoming needlessly paranoiac. it had surely been an innocent or careless mistake on elena's part. she had probably been brooding distractedly on her son's attack of bronchitis, peevishness or homosexuality or whatever it was that regularly prevented her from either turning up or from having a noticeable effect when she did. she was italian and probably had absentmindedly mistaken his food for garbage.

but the business with the hair changed it all. it established beyond all possible doubt that she knew exactly what se was doing. she was under no circumstances going to open the fridge door until he opened it first, and he was under no circumstances going to open the fridge until she did.

obviously she had not noticed his hair, otherwise it would have been her most effective course simply to pull it off, thus tricking him into thinking she had opened the fridge. he should presumably now remove her hair in the hope of pulling that same trick on her, but even as he sat there he knew that somehow that wouldn't work, aand that they were locked into a tightening spiral of non-fridge opening that would lead them both to madness or perdition.

he wondered if he could hire someone to come and open the fridge.