Picture it…you’re heading outside on a weekend afternoon, and you find the following on your way down stairs:
Oh great, someone got stabbed.
But wait…where’s the bloody palm prints on the wall? Where’s the blood trail? Where’s the body? Where’s the yellow crime scene tape? Where’s all the stuff you see on TV? What the heck happened here?
Ah. Looks like someone spilled a bunch of tomato sauce.
It doesn’t look like they broke a bottle because there’s no glass, and why would someone clean up the glass and leave the tomato sauce? So maybe it was just a spill, but if that’s the case, why would anyone have open tomato sauce on the staircase anyway? Why the eff didn’t they clean it up?!
So many questions; so few answers.
But who says the ketchup came in a glass bottle?
One is fixing a cheeseburger and realizes, duh!, I’m out of ketchup. Off to a neighbor they go to borrow some. It’s one of those squeezy plastic bottles. On the way back to their flat, they trip, lose their balance, drop the ketchup and then accidently tread on it. Now’s there ketchup on the floor because it spurted out the top.
Or maybe it is from a mutated tomato that bleeds ketchup when cut and your steps are the result of a killing field.
There are a few spots of sauce on the steps below the main spill so it looks like the container continued to drip and the person was walking down the stairs. Based on that, I’ve come up with this hypothesis…
It all started when Ryan was 13. He met Kimberley in history class and was taken by her long blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes. He stared at her from across the classroom and daydreamed of one day making her his wife. He watched her in the cafeteria as she ate her spaghetti and knew that someday he would be making her spaghetti using his grandmother’s secret recipe. They became good friends and spent a lot of time together. Until one day near the end of their 8th grade year, Kimberley broke the news to Ryan that she was moving to California because of her dad’s job. The news broke Ryan’s spirit and he spent his high school years moping in loneliness. Ryan and Kimberley e-mailed every now and then, but it wasn’t the same and Ryan feared that he’d never see her again. Fast forward ten years later and Kimberley contacts Ryan and tells him that she just got a new job at an ad agency here in New York. They make plans to meet up, and since they were both still single, Ryan’s hopes were re-ignited. He was going to take her out to a nice, romantic dinner and win her over with his charm, just like 13 year old Ryan did. But, the day after they make the plans, Ryan is laid off and didn’t have any savings so he realizes an expensive dinner isn’t possible. He remembers that Kimberley loves spaghetti, so then he decides that he will use his grandmother’s secret recipe and cook for her and have a nice candlelit dinner in his apartment.
And that leads us to how the tomato sauce ended up on your stairway…
I thought it would be funny to leave a puddle of tomato sauce on the stairway so I dumped a can there knowing that you would be puzzled by it and possibly write an article. Then I wrote a dumb, elaborate story to waste your time before telling you what really happened. Success!
Not really, I have no idea who you are or where your stairway is. I was just really really bored.
Maybe someone came back with their grocery shopping, all in a bag, and including ketchup. As they were going up the stairs they almost tripped (maybe cell phone rang?). To stop themselves from falling, they reached out (as one normally does) and in doing so, they banged the bag on the step. The ketchup bottle was at the bottom, and it broke. The bag had a tear or two, or more, and the sauce oozed out. After spending some time rubbing their bruised knees & shins, (while the ketchup still oozed out), they continued up the stairs, trying to drip as little as possible, with the intention of cleaning up asap. As they got inside & cleared up the mess in the bag, their cell rang again (same person of before?), and they got carried away. They remained inside, and forgot all about the “bloody” stains on the stairs.
Oh I don’t know…! <img src="http://joshmadison.com/images/smileys/raspberry.gif" width="19" height="19" alt="raspberry" style="border:0;" />
Having another look at the picture, this is going to be a real pain to get the stain off those steps.
Then again, nobody has bothered to get the paint off the handrail…..
All perfectly plausible theories, but I think Rowena is probably closest to what actually happened. I hope that Ryan and Kimberley get together and have a long, happy life with each other.
I do want to note that the “spill” was completely cleaned up when I got home later that day. It was a tomato sauce that one would put on spaghetti, so it was not as thick as ketchup, and cleaned up rather nicely.