On a recent Sunday morning, as I rounded the corner that leads into my kitchen, I happened to look up. What I saw was something straight out of a Stephen King novel. Six brown blobs hung from the ceiling, encircled by what looked like a wet spot. One of the blobs was shaped like a baby bat. Another resembled a garden snail, antennae and all. Two had Saturn-like rings around them and one was shaped like a lemon.
I began to tremble. I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart was about to explode from my chest. What to do? What to do? What to do?
Logic told me to watch and see if the blobs were moving or growing or if they were being joined by more of their kind. I stood stock-still (or as still as I could considering my elevated anxiety) and studied them. They were as still as I was. Summoning my last bit of courage, I climbed a step ladder to get a closer look. The invaders looked to be made of something like cookie dough. Or melted chocolate. Or—and here’s what they really looked like—dog poop.
Which leads me to write about something horrible that had happened earlier that week. My dog suffered a massive bout of diarrhea while I was gone from the house. Her bathroom spots of choice were three beds in three different bedrooms, which forced me to do eight straight hours of laundry before everything was finally cleaned up.
But the bedrooms aren’t anywhere near the kitchen. And no mammal that walks on a floor can poop on a ceiling. Also, whatever this was hanging from my ceiling had no discernable odor. Thank goodness.
There was nothing to be done that Sunday morning but head on to church and show the photos I’d taken to anyone willing to look at them. One friend suggested that recent torrential rains might have caused strange mushrooms to grow out of my ceiling. Another opined that bees had taken up residence in the space between the ceiling and roof and that these were honey drips. Others asked if I’d made a chocolate milkshake in a blender but forgotten to put the lid on.
My trusty handyman Bob arrived first thing Monday morning and set his ladder up under the spots, which had not changed in any discernable way since I first discovered them.
“That’s not water around whatever these are,” he proclaimed. “It’s oil.” Then Bob did something I still can’t get over. He stuck a finger into the gunk and tasted it. “There’s not much to say about this except it’s gritty,” he said. Then he scraped the blobs off the ceiling into a zip-lock bag and scrubbed the greasy spot with dish soap and hot water.
My friend Janet Coonce, who teaches chemistry at Tennessee Tech, took it from there. Her analysis of the substance in the bag pointed to dog food. “Dog food?” I asked. “How would dog food get on the ceiling?”
Janet shrugged. “If it’s not dog food, it’s something a whole lot like it.” And then came the epiphany. I’d taken Kamala to the vet the day after the diarrhea disaster. He sent me home with some pills and a tube of canine probiotic paste. On Thursday morning, I had trouble coaxing the paste out of the tube and had—foolishly, it turns out–smacked the end of the syringe down on the counter in the corner of the kitchen to force it to work. Paste came squirting out and a glob of it landed in my hair.
Apparently, some of it wound up on the ceiling, too, in bizarre Rorschach shapes. As to how I managed not to notice them between Thursday and Sunday, I have no answer. All I know is that I’m exceedingly glad I don’t have aliens living in my kitchen.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: You can view a photo of the blobs on my August 29 Facebook post.
(August 29, 2026)