Yum.

So over the weekend I was cleaning out my fridge — BEFORE it started to smell like a landfill — and found, way, way, way at the back, hiding out like a poor, lost, fuzzy child, or maybe a fugitive from justice who’s been on the lam from Albany County Sheriff deputies for 87 years, the above advanced mold formation.

And when I say “advanced,” I mean it probably talks. In all likelihood it holds a Ph.D in some obscure academic discipline, like the history of peanut farming or Indoeuropean ethnohistoriographic geomorphology. If I asked it how long it had been in the fridge, it would respond, “Umm, twelve weeks, maybe?” and then add, “No, no, more like six months, it was before I grew the beard” before snapping, “Why the hell do YOU care, anyway? It’s kind of late to ask!” I would then turn defensive, saying I’ve only owned this particular fridge since late November, so Professor Snotty Fungus couldn’t be more than six weeks old, seven tops, at which point the mold would roll its eyes and say, “Whatever.”

At first, after liberating this sentient being from the back of my fridge, I wondered what form it had taken in its larval stage — i.e., when it might have been defined as “food.” I tried staring at it really close, but not too close, 1) because I’m far-sighted, and as I bent over my reading glasses slid down my nose into the fuzzy part, which, by the way, was wet; and 2) because it kind of scared me.

Then I recognized it. Do you? If you don’t, I don’t blame you; it looks more like Rip Van Winkle’s deformed lost twin, the one that got half-absorbed into the placenta before being born, than something that might in an earlier era have been consumed by anything other the occupant of John Hurt’s chest in “Alien.” Speaking of aliens, it rather resembles those flying neural boogers that sting Spock in the back in that old episode of “Star Trek,” doesn’t it?

Otherwise, I’m not going to say what it is. If you’re not too grossed out to give it a close look, you can guess.