It was a typical Wednesday and the school bells were ringing for lunch to commence. My friends and I all gathered together and after three minutes of light quarreling we concluded that Taco Bell would be the destination of choice for lunch. We arrived and ordered, each of my friends ordering overcooked meaty morsels, and I ordering a safe, flesh-free, seven-layer burrito. School lunch lasted thirty minutes and because we had chosen the slowest fast food restaurant in town, we had to rush back to school with our uneaten grub in our hands.

We arrived back and dispersed into our different four-walled asylum-like classrooms to eat our lunch. I ripped into my burrito with uncontrollable hunger, inhaling the tortilla-wrapped concoction so quickly that I was unable to savor its flavor. Midway through the seven-layer wonder I was abruptly interrupted when I bit into a solid fragment of my food. Unable to chew through the morsel, and uninterested in doing so, I spit the foreign object into my hand to familiarize myself with its content. Out it came: a fuzzy slimy, malachite green, long and hard substance. Upon further investigation I realized that I had bitten into a halfway decomposed bone.

Up until this moment I had been sitting quietly in a stagnant history course, but at the time of my discovery my stomach began to rage and I jumped from my seat and ran across the room and into the hallway. I instantaneously evacuated the eaten portion of the burrito, and some of my earlier breakfast, from my body and into the nearest waste receptacle. Once my convulsions stabilized, I was able to go to a restroom where I spent the remainder of the day.

Since this traumatic food experience, I have found myself dissecting everything that has been prepared by a second party, even frozen tv dinners. It is bewildering how one sickening food incident have lead to multiple abnormal eating rituals. These rituals include cutting wrapped foods into tiny pieces, stirring beans and pasta in search of foreign objects, and taking entire sandwiches apart and reassembling them. My slimy bone experience has shaped my phobia of food into what it is today.