Morning all, ready to jump into the morning prompt? Excellent, timers set for fifteen minutes and off we go.
I like this one, not sure where it is going, but it could be a fun segement to add into a different story.
Thursday, June 25th: The difference was noticeable.
The difference was noticeable. The bottles were identical but the contents were two distinctly different shades. It reminded him of his older brother, Charles. In high school, Charles and his friends would pour out a measure of alcohol into a separate container and then add water to the bottle so it looked like it was at the same level. A few times, they took so much food coloring had to be added in order to make the bottle look right.
‘They didn’t worry about anyone drinking it because no one ever would.’
The bottles had been a hold over from his grandfather. He fixed himself one drink from the liquer cabinet every night. After he died, the glass fronted cabinet was left alone. No one removed the bottles as getting rid of full bottles would have seemed like a waste.
‘And what if company shows up?’ he remembered his grandmother asking.
So the bottles remained and since they never had visitors, at least not the sort who were offered a drink, the bottles were untouched. ‘I think they used soy sauce to dye the brown ones,’ he recalled. By the time Charles left for college Danny doubted there was any actual alcohol left in the bottles.
He set the thought to the side. These bottles were not the result of teenage siphoning. They were not even opened. ‘Not even alcohol,’ he said.
The were bottles of a type of salad dressing he liked. Sometimes he used it on salad. Most of the times he used it to dip his pretzels in as a simple dip. He thought the bottle in his fridge was nearly empty and added a new one to his grocery list. But he had been good lately, cutting out more snacks than he planned. The bottle was in the fridge, but unopened. And yet it was a darker shade than the one he recently purchased.
He pulled the bottles out of the fridge and stared at them. Both were cold as the one from the store had been in the refrigerated section. Both were sealed. ‘So no oxidation.’
Under the light in the kitchen it was clear to see they were two distinctly different shades. He turned them around and began reading the labels, looking from one to the other. The ingredients were the same but there were three that were in a different order.
‘The recipe changed. He knew that the more of an ingredient an item had, the earlier it appeared on the ingredients list. The three ingredients that moved were shuffled back on the list while water was shuffled forward.
Danny snorted. “They added more water, took out some of the other stuff and raised the price.” He put the bottles back in the fridge. He would taste it later to see if the flavor changed. If it did then he might not be buying it anymore. ‘But as I am eating fewer snacks then I would be buying less anyway.’
Still he was curious about the flavor. He wasn’t terribly surprised by the change. Lots of things were changing these days. One of his coworkers had a batch of her famous brittle go horribly wrong because the dairy companies added more water to their butter than usual. Until she complained about her ruined baking, he hadn’t realized here was water in butter. He assumed it was somehow a part of the mix, but thought it was in their naturally, not something a company added.
The butter debacle had been bad but another of their coworker’s reported shrinkage in the candy aisle.
Ten til Midnight 