R.I.P. Banana

I was eating a late dinner last night at the little green folding table in our kitchen while talking to my little sister on the phone, when I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that my roommate was up on her knees on the kitchen counter, with her head jammed in the little space between the window and the cabinet and her butt sticking straight up in the air. There was a faint smell of banana wafting past my nose.

"Uh, what are you doing?"

"I dropped a banana. And it didn't just fall on the windowsill, it fell behind the cabinet. These things only happen to me!"

I sighed, hung up with my sister, and left my dinner half-eaten on the table while she jumped off the counter and started furiously opening and slamming drawers and cabinets. Short of dismantling the cabinets, there was no way get behind the cabinet from the front, so we'd have to get there from the back: a one-foot wide by three-foot deep space under the counter and behind the cabinet, mostly obscured by a metal bar across the top and the wall below the window. Or risk the return of Nelson (formerly known as Squeaky) and living with a kitchen that perpetually smelled of rotting banana. We got to work.

I held the flashlight and my roommate, a coat hanger. The banana was sitting about three feet down in the middle of a graveyard of never-again-played CDs, dust, and scraps of paper. When the coat hanger proved useless, I bent it a different way a tried again while my roommate held the flashlight. With each pierce of the metal coat hanger in the bruising yellow skin came another whiff of the future smell of our kitchen, made all the more dramatic by the dull thump I heard each time I tried to lift the hanger and the slick meat of the banana slipped off. We opened the window that hadn't been open since last summer, hoping we could unscrew the gate over it and get through the hole from a different angle. We were greeted by a shower of pebbles.

I taped a spatula securely to the end of the coat hanger and fished around while my roommate pawed through our drawers, looking for a pair of tongs, a barbecue poker, or anything more sturdy than a coat hanger. She stuck her arm down the hole as far as it would go, her head jammed awkwardly against the windowsill, one leg stretched straight up in the air. Her arm and taught fingers were just slightly too short to reach the now black banana. The circle of the flashlight bounced around in the hole while I giggled, my roommate teetering dangerously on her one hand on the counter, shaking from laughter.

We found a metal pounder of some sort, with a long handle and a sturdy base held by a triangle of metal arms that was just thin enough to maybe, just maybe, stick under the banana. I stuck my finger in the loop at the end of the instrument, stuck my arm down the hole, and very carefully scooped up the banana. We stifled our laughs and tried not to make a sound as I slowly raised the banana, my roommate ready with her hand to grab it. She did, and it ended up, like the mouse, securely fastened in a plastic bag, black and furry with dust, waiting to go down to the dumpster with the rest of the trash.

I finished my dinner. But I'm not sure I'll ever look at bananas the same way again.