The fulgorous intermittent blinding brilliance ebbed away. What was left was a crepuscular landscape of annular, tubular, and blockish forms wrapped tight for the encroaching darkness, some still emitting a faint glow, leaking traces of absorbed waveforms echoing visual rays of their internal vibrations. Faint hisses and gurgles of indeterminate sources began to once again be overwhelmend by a continuous whir and mind numbing buzzing that accompanied the stabilization of temperature and growing dark. Again plunged in total darkness, there would be plenty of time to parse shards of a mettallic grid, a clear plastic bucket, or a smooth white surface that delineated the boundaries of this environment.

The shards included a separate brand of produce, that had developed mobility. These images bubbled from aching depths, recalling memories mostly erased. This mobile produce surveyed its wasted domain and moved on.

The insouciant cheese bridled and bucked in the meat drawer, disconcertingly out of place and disappointingly passed over again. It was almost as if the only foregone conclusion was to let the sleeping cheese lie.

Of course no one would revise a heart set on the ripe blister package of liverwurst or peppercorn turkey to reach for this soft block, a little hard around the edges but nevertheless retaining a warm and yielding center. And still, the sebaceous block quivered and hoped that if it were not the gratified hand of an eager cheese lover then at least a decisive end. Granted eternal absolution from a bloody abattoir whose packaged corpses fueled the dripping maw of senseless brutality, an end to a continual slippage from useful product to simple description of space, an existence the binary values of which were the dividing line between space and not-space.

This environment was often painfully immutable, spatial relationships seldom altered by new product, a permanent 38 degree atmosphere maintained by a gibbering and idiot computer brain. Perhaps the oppressive sameness in this environment was not reflected outside. Had budget cuts from the deli slicer of economic vicissitude forced a turn to canned goods and bread? Or perhaps a purchase or inheritance of a refrigidaire simply too large, that could afford to hold expendable elements, slipping by unnoticed in the daily bustle of mobile produce?

The answer, if there was one, was not simple.

Time of unknown magnitude had allowed the development of simple skills, such as mold repulsion and thought projection. The hardest part was developing the mental discipline to overcome the rubber sealed door that maintained the separation between the outside world and the food friendly environment enclosed within.

The door seems to have a superiority complex; those within its confines cannot leave unless the door is open. The introduction of new members to the community is only possible through the door. The harsh gleam of the naked bulb develops an optic correspondence, that is continually calling attention to the simultaneous action of that which secures the whirling hell of the perishables.

Come what may, the death of countless fresh and pickled vegetables and their karmic rebirth, the slow demise of varied condiments, or the mutilation of leftovers, forkful by forkful with the door open mockingly as the other refrigerateds observed in terror, some resolving to let down their mold resistance and to grow into nothing; all of this is presided over by the door.

Perhaps the door grows wiser, prefering to see the coming and going of the produce as metaphoric for the wear and tear associated with each opening and closing, the slow grinding down and eventual breakage of its own mechanism. Or maybe it just deems itself better than those within who always pass by before discovering the secret process of their end.

Developing the psychic prowess to extend beyond the door, then is a private victory of great magnitude for the lactic culture derivative, a clarification of the limits of the power of the door. No longer insurmountable, it becomes clear that the door is simply another not-space whose actions are completely determined by the whims of the mobile produce.

So here at last is the key to the greatest mysteries. What is this mobile produce? Who are these perishables who apparently do not need refrigeration, precisely because they contain within their poorly sealed packages the mysterious power of locomotion?

Reaching out, nervously at first, but with growing assurance (most notably after the interruption of a mental sojourn by the door's opening, with no consequences to the sebaceous uberproduce) contact was made with those outside.

Strange patterns of thought emerged, developed by those whose makeup was entirely alien, whose basic construction was inorganic, mineral and synthetic polymers forming bodies who had more in common with the wrapping that surrounded him and the bottles, the shelves, and the door whose base psychology gave little hope as to the disposition of these newly discovered forms. Stifling back the bitter bile of xenophobia, contact was made.

"How am I to understand the cycles of ingestion and gnashing of teeth by the mobile produce, who stride about as if they will not too be consumed by another? Arms akimbo in their overexxagerated posture of superiority in the manner of the morally bankrupt door. What have you learned, blessed with the sight and understanding of the mysterious ways of the outer?"

"You're splitting hairs with 'inner and outer'. We're not outside, we too are inside. We are enclosed within a larger structure, another degree of servitude and enclosure. Your assumptions determined by your immediate surroundings are themselves surrounding you."

"So the mobile produce is itself enclosed? Who controls their climate? What is their door?"