Maid In China

By Isaac Krone

Nov. 16, 2014

According to recent reports, area bachelor Aziz Ruffalo’s cleaning woman is currently on vacation in the People’s Republic of China. Ana Vikernes, the maid in question, is scheduled to spend two weeks touring the world’s most populous country in search of her inner self. Before leaving, she thoughtfully pinned a short list of helpful suggestions for keeping the apartment tidy onto the fridge.

Within fourteen hours of her departure, the note was lost, soaked in soy sauce, recovered and used unsuccessfully as a napkin, and finally dropped under a couch where a large amount of detritus had begun to accrue. Ruffalo’s slovenly ways quickly reduced his once respectable home into a hovel barely recognizable as a human domicile.

Shortly after his maid had gone, Ruffalo decided to order pizza for dinner. After consuming it and finding himself still not satiated, he slid the box behind his TV and left his apartment to seek further sustenance.

At 8:00 PM, he returned with a baby stroller carrying one rotting elk leg, a crate of navel oranges, and three satellite dishes. These were deposited in his kitchen sink for temporary storage. Save for the elk leg, which Ruffalo found to be a much better fit in his umbrella stand once he removed the three stilts jammed into it. Unbeknownst to him, the navel oranges harbored a pregnant brown bat.

The next morning, Ruffalo awoke feeling a tad peckish and decided to make himself a quick breakfast before work. This required that he gather several stacks of newspapers and electrical wiring for placement on his coffee table. These were doused in gasoline and set alight to make a fire over which Ruffalo roasted a small chunk of the elk leg speared on one of the stilts that it had evicted.

Upon returning to his apartment later that night, the bachelor noticed that his breakfast preparations had left a large smoke stain on his living room ceiling. The ingenious MacGyver immediately saw an opportunity to use his canny construction skills to solve this problem, and the blackened patch was quickly covered by whiteout and A4 papers which he nailed to the ceiling with a collection of fish hooks and broken fork tines.

Now looking for something fun to do, Ruffalo happened upon his Xbox under a pile of underwear and takeout menus in which the little brown bat had been nesting. Forgetting how to set up the device and distracted by the small mammal now flapping around his apartment, the bachelor decided it was high time he got some work done and decided to clean out his fridge.

Just forty eight hours after Ana Vikernes stepped onto a plane to Beijing, Ruffalo had succeeded in introducing four species of small mammal, three invasive grasses, two bald tires filled with insect larvae and approximately fourteen large Asian carp in various stages of asphyxiation into his now irreparable apartment. His ceiling suffered major structural damage and a wall in his bathroom was now nowhere to be found. When Chicago police arrived on the scene a day later, Aziz Ruffalo was found buried under a collapsed tent made of three hoodies and a washtub bass suffering from hypothermia and dehydration. He is currently being held in an induced coma at Northwestern hospital and is expected to make a full recovery when his maid returns.