I don’t know if I’ve shown this house or told this story before on here, but I’m old enough now for people to expect me to repeat myself, so whatever.
Here’s the setup. This was an old house on a shady street in Tuscaloosa that I shared with two roommates who were sisters. The door went into an entryway where I set up a desk with a couple of chairs and held office hours with my students. Right off the office were stairs going to the second floor, and next to those, the room with the double windows was my bedroom. The rest of the downstairs was a separate apartment, with beautiful glass doors locked between the apartment where two guys lived and our part of the house. I don’t remember if we ever opened those doors or just went around to the other entrances, but we hung out with them and they with us, and we all went to each other’s parties.
On the second floor, which was all ours, the sisters each had a bedroom, and there was a large living room, a bathroom, and the kitchen. Off one corner of the kitchen was a sort of trunk room that we could use to store extra furniture, our luggage, and put bikes or whatever if we had them. Closest to that little room was our stove.
Both the sisters had a tendency to peel and slice potatoes and make French fries at all hours of the day and night. (Typical for late-night studying.) The younger sister liked to take tortillas, quarter them, and fry them so that they puffed up. She’d then sprinkle them with powdered sugar, and she called them “fake beignets.” (Here are real beignets; I don’t have a photo of the fake beignets.)
Since they had something greasy going a lot, they just kept one of my iron skillets, filled halfway with cooking oil, on the (cold) stovetop all the time. Me being older and more cautious, I often told them this was a bad idea. The air is full of things: dishwashing detergent bubbles, our exhaled breath, sneeze droplets–need I go on? At the very least, I said, they should put a lid on the skillet. But they shrugged off my suggestion, and so it goes.
One afternoon, I was sitting at the kitchen table, probably writing a paper for one of my graduate classes. I kept hearing this little noise, but no one else was in the house, so I ignored it. It was just by chance that I looked up and across the kitchen, which is when I realized what the noise was. A little mouse was perched on the edge of the skillet and leaning over to lap up grease. What I’d been hearing was his little tongue hard at work drinking the grease of potatoes and dough. After I sucked in air, I stood, and like a flash he was down the stove and slipping under the door to the trunk room.
I disposed of the grease and scrubbed that skillet for who knows how long, and after that, we co-eixsted with our non-paying resident, but the Grease Skillet Bar was permanently closed to him.