Welcome to Storybound, presented by LitHub Radio and the Podglomerate.

I'm your host, Jude Brewer.

Coming up in one minute is a story told by Nathan Hill with original composition by Tim Carplus. Ponage opened the refrigerator door, then close the refrigerator door.

He stood in his kitchen trying really hard to remember the reason he came in here,

but he couldn't come

up with it.

He checked his email.

He tried logging onto World of Elvescape, but could not.

It was Tuesday.

He thought about going outside to the mailbox to get the mail, but did not end up going

outside because the mail might not have been delivered yet, and he didn't want to make

two trips.

He looked across his front lawn at the mailbox, trying to judge whether there was mail in it by staring.

He closed the door.

He felt like something needed his attention in the kitchen, but did not know what.

He opened the refrigerator and looked at every item in the fridge, hoping one of them would serve as a kind of trigger for the thing he was supposed to remember about the kitchen. He saw the

jars of pickles and plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup and mayonnaise, and a bag of flaxseed he

bought once in a moment of diet optimism but had not yet opened. There were five

eggplants on the bottom shelf, clearly mushening from the inside, slowly collapsing in on themselves,

five little purple pillows with small pools of biscuit-colored juice gathering under them.

In the produce drawer, his various greens were brown and

wilted. So were the cobs of corn on the top shelf, which were a sickly ecru, every

...