Beggin for Bacon

There was a quick knock at the door as the deliveryman dropped off the house groceries. The drop off was a little bit later today than normal, around two thirty instead of one forty-five. On any other day, this wouldn’t be much cause for alarm. A bit of an inconvenience, but oh well. Today, however, they would need every spare minute they could get. Tanya opened the door to find five plastic bags on their doorstep. They could easily be carried in one trip.

When she bent down to pick them up, she noticed something strange. An odd smell that seemed to hover around them. It wasn’t unpleasant, but… odd. It must have just been the deliveryman. She quickly shook the smell out of her super sniffer and gathered the bags up in her arms. She turned to bring them inside, and bumped the door shut behind her.

“Just the essentials” Shane had told her when she’s asked what had been on the order.

Tanya swung the bags up onto the counter and started unpacking items, while Shane worked in his “office,” and Carmichael slept in his dungeon. The first bag had contained a family sized pack of m&ms, a loaf of bread, a four pack of butter, and a box of popcorn.

“Hardly essential,” Tanya murmured to herself as she put away the candy and snacks.

She wadded up the empty bag and shoved it under their sink into the endless sea of plastic that had come before. The smell had followed her inside. It pressed against the walls of her nose and tickled her sinuses. Using the back of her hand, she aggressively tried to rub the smell out of her nose before moving onto the next bag.

At first glance, the second bag looked like it only held three items: a carton of eggs, some sliced cheese, and a thing of deli turkey. A harmless assortment of goods, you would think. But unfortunately for the inhabitants of the apartment 4A, there was something sinister in that bag. Something that was great cause for alarm, hiding underneath the eggs. Tanya tossed the butter into the fridge and shut the door with her hip. Wait. Was it cheaper to just keep the door open? Rather than opening and shutting it every time she needed to put something in there? She wasn’t sure, she’d try to remember to look it up later once she was done.

She grabbed the deli meat and cheese to put in their respective drawer and moved around some half-eaten boxes of leftovers to make room for the rest. They needed to go through the fridge and throw out all of the old food before it started to colonize new worlds of bacteria. As she turned back to grab the carton of eggs, she realized that there was a cold package underneath them. Something she had missed in her initial look through. It felt thick and soft, like pad of meat. She pushed the eggs to the side and pulled the bundle out from the bottom of the bag. The second the package came into sight, her eyes grew wide, and her face faded to gray. A hard lump formed in the pit of her stomach and grew into the back of her throat.

God help them. It was a package of thick cut maple bacon.

She grabbed the bacon tightly and ripped it out from the bag.

“SHAAAANE!”

She tore down the hallway toward his room.

“SHANE GET OUT HERE,” she called out.

Tanya pushed open his door to see him sitting behind his desk with a look of utter shock.

He muted his headset, “Tanya, what the hell are you doing?! I am at work and on the phone with a customer.”

Tanya shoved her way into his room, “I don’t give a fuck if you’re on the phone with the Queen of England and Mary Mother of God, end the call, now.”

Shane hurriedly turned his mic back on to explain to the customer that there had been a household emergency, and that he would unfortunately have to call back later. Tanya stood there holding the cursed meat in one hand and bouncing her knee impatiently. As Shane took off his headset, Carmichael could be heard from in his room.

“What in the absolute fuck is going on out here?”

He jerked open his own door in a rage, and came out pulling on a pair of pajama pants over his gangly legs.

“For god’s sake, it’s not even three yet. This better be important or I swear to God, I’ll be sending my best to your surviving relatives.”

Carmichael looked at them both, waiting for an explanation. Shane gestured wildly to Tanya.

“Ask her! She just busted into my room yelling for no reason.”

Tanya said nothing to either of them; she just glared at Shane and bounced her knee at a million miles an hour. Carmichael kicked through a pile of Shane’s laundry to confront her but stopped in his tracks when he saw what Tanya was holding in her outstretched hand.

“…is that,” he murmured.

Tanya nodded, “MHMM, it is.”

Carmichael started to rub what little blood he had left in his system into his cheeks.

“Shit man, fuuuuck.” He groaned.

Shane stared at them, flabbergasted, “It’s a package of BACON?”

Tanya rolled her eyes and tossed the pack of bacon at him, “we can see that dipshit, why did you add it to the grocery order?”

Shane caught the bacon and looked to Carmichael for reassurance, but he was too busy having a mental breakdown on the floor.

“Because I wanted bacon? Why are you guys freaking out over off brand bacon?”

Tanya’s foot was wearing a dent into the carpet, “we’re freaking out because you’ve screwed us Shane, you’ve really screwed us.”

With that, she turned and left the room to stomp back to the kitchen. Carmichael had started to edge back from the brink of insanity and stood up from the floor. His face was strained with frenzied dread. Shane attempted to ask him what was going on, but Carmichael refused to answer. He just held up his hand to cut him off and followed Tanya into the kitchen. From his desk, Shane could hear their hurried ramblings as cabinets and drawers were slammed shut. He probably could’ve heard it even if he had been standing a block away, they weren’t quiet people.

It started with Carmichael.

“What the hell are we going to do, Tanya?”

He could hear her stomping down the hall as she said, “Well, first off you’re going to put on a shirt because I’m sick of looking at your whiter than white bird chest.”

Tanya burst into his room again, pushing the door so hard it bounced against the wall and back against her hand. This time she had the trash bag in her hands.

“Get up and toss the bacon in here, I have to take it outside to the dumpster.”

Carmichael passed behind her into his room, presumably to grab a shirt.

“Get. Up.” she barked, wagging the bag in front of him.

Shane felt it would be best at this point not to argue and tossed his bacon into the garbage bag as he got up from his seat.

Tanya caught the outlawed breakfast food and pulled the drawstrings of the bag tight before tying it shut.

“Good,” she murmured before yelling out, “CARMICHAEL, YOU AND SHANE ARE GOING TO START CLEANING THE HOUSE WHILE I’M GONE- THERE’S BLEACH AND FLOOR CLEANER UNDER THE SINK.”

Carmichael came out from his room pulling an old t-shirt over his head. Tanya rolled her eyes as she pushed past him to take out the garbage.

“You know you can get dressed before you come out of your room, right?” she muttered to him under her breath.

He shot her a dirty look and shot back, “and you know you literally never have to yell, because everyone in the tri-state area can hear you when you whisper, right?”

She scoffed and slammed the door behind her. It should be one of those two morons that had to take it out, she thought. But Carmichael would burst into flames if he stepped outside at three o’clock in the afternoon, and Shane would burst into tears if he stepped outside at any time of the day. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.

Carmichael waved his hand for Shane to come with him and set off down the hallway to make the cleaning buckets.

“Why are you guys panicking over some bacon; it didn’t even get opened?” Shane asked as he followed behind.

Carmichael ignored him and opened the cabinet doors beneath the sink to start pulling out everything they would need to cleanse and disinfect the apartment. Hopefully, they would get it all done in time. Bleach, floor cleaner, rags, mop buckets, where was the detergent?

“Shane, where’s the Arm and Hammer?” he asked.

“What?”

Carmichael slammed the cabinet doors shut, “The Arm and Hammer, where is the laundry detergent?”

“Um, I think it’s in the bathroom,” Shane said, unsure if he was ever going to receive an explanation at this point.

“Why is it in- never mind, I don’t care. Go grab it, and while you’re in there grab the tiny trash can and empty it out; we’re going to need to use it as a bucket.”

Shane rolled his eyes and went to gather the requested materials.

Grabbing the detergent and bin from the bathroom proved to be more difficult than Shane had thought. Someone (he wouldn’t name names, Tanya) had forgotten to put a bag in the now almost overflowing tiny trash bin. While he waited for Shane to come back from the bathroom, Carmichael started filling one of the buckets with hot water and bleach.

“Come on man, hurry up. We do NOT have a lot of time.”

In another attempt to get any form of clarity on the chaos at hand, Shane called out:

“Can you please explain to me why we’re bleaching the apartment?”

Carmichael was setting the first bucket on the kitchen floor just as Shane came back from the bathroom.

He waved him over, “Give me the trash bin- oh god, this is disgusting. Damn it, Tanya.”

He jerked his head to the side to point to the steaming bucket of bleach water on the floor, “Put a scoop of the detergent into that and stir it up, and I’ll explain.”

Shane did what he was told, if for no reason other than to finally get an answer for the chaos at hand. Carmichael filled up the second mop bucket, then put it on the ground next to Shane, indicating that he needed to mix it as well.

“You brought bacon into the house, she can’t have bacon around,” Carmichael said as he rinsed out the pieces of toilet paper, and other things, from the bathroom trash.

Shane sat back against the floor dumbfounded. Of course, how had he been so stupid?

“Oh my god,” he grumbled, “I hadn’t even thought about it not being kosher.”

Carmichael turned away from the sink to look at Shane; his forehead scrunched up and his nose wrinkled in confusion.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Shane got back to stirring the mop buckets, this time with more dedication.

“That’s why Tanya’s so freaked out.” He said, “It isn’t kosher- I feel terrible.”

Carmichael snorted and finished filling the last ‘bucket.’

“Are you kidding me? I watched Tanya eat two double bacon burgers LAST WEEK, no,” he said as he dropped a rag into the water and plopped down onto the floor.

Shane was so confused, he felt like his head was going to burst and give them an all-new reason to scrub the walls. Luckily, Carmichael had only been taking a (semi- dramatic) pause.

“No, it’s Viola,” he said scrubbing at the floor under the counters.

Shane stopped stirring. He was so befuddled, the word just fell out of his mouth, “what?”

Carmichael looked back to see Shane wasting what precious time they had left and threw a rag at his face.

“For god’s sake man, clean! Scour, scour!” he shouted.

Shane jerked back and caught the rag (not before it could connect with his face, though). It smelled like stale mildew, though, he wasn’t exactly sure what fresh mildew would smell like or how he could tell the difference between either. He dunked it in the water and decided to press Carmichael further.

“What do you mean, Viola?”

At that moment, the sounded of hasty footsteps could be heard echoing through the hall outside. They started off quiet, then grew louder and louder until the front door burst open. It swung against the wall, and Tanya bolted around the corner into view.

“OH GOD, IS SHE HERE?”

Without looking up, Carmichael shook his head and kept scrubbing.

“No,” he said, “and again inside voices. Please, I am very tired.”

She sighed, “Sorry, are these the buckets we’re using?”

Carmichael nodded and gestured toward the two Shane had been stirring. Tanya ignored Shane’s desperate look of bewilderment, and spoke only to Carmichael as she came to grab a bucket and a rag. She wasn’t doing it to intentionally be passive aggressive (though that was the impression), but they only had at best an hour before V would be home, and time was of the essence.

“You guys take the counter and floors in here, I’m going to clean the front door and the entry way, after that, we can start disinfecting the living room.”

He had reached his limit.

Shane tossed the rag back into the bucket and pushed them both away.

“I’m not cleaning anything until I get more of an explanation,” he said, “I’m putting my foot down.”

In something that Shane felt was akin to a horror move, Tanya and Carmichael turned to him with an almost calculated slowness. Their eyes looked hollow, and cold. He swallowed the lump that was forming in his throat. He had to stay calm. The only way he had managed to go unnoticed by them for so long, was through staying to himself, being confident, and honestly, sheer force of luck.

Tanya and Carmichael shared a glance between themselves that seemed to say: might as well, we don’t have the time to argue. The duty to inform was once again delegated to Tanya. Even though she felt it shouldn’t have to be HER responsibility to educate the men in this house on every little thing that passed.

“Fine,” she said, “but we’re going to have to clean while I explain, or we might as well be shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Shane agreed that that was fair, even if he didn’t understand the need for urgency. He went to wipe down the counters, while Tanya got to work on the door, and Carmichael cleaned beside the stove.

“Viola doesn’t want bacon in the house,” she said as she began aggressively wiping down the doorframe, “to be more accurate, Viola refuses to allow ANY pork product in the house, and she ALWAYS knows when someone’s brought some in.”

Carmichael looked up from the floor, “one time, I brought home a thing of pig’s blood because I didn’t feel like going out to eat-” he grimaced and shook his head, “-singlehandedly one of the worst times of my life- hey, don’t stop scrubbing.”

Shane swept crumbs from the counter into the sink and started to wipe everything down

“Why does she have such a big issue with bacon?”

Carmichael and Tanya shook their heads.

Tanya said, “we don’t know, you know how she is about sharing that kind of stuff. BUT I for one, don’t really need to know in order to not want to get my ass chewed out and have silver shavings scattered in the carpet.”

“Or to wake up to all of the living room blinds open again,” Carmichael added.

Tanya rinsed out her rag and rang it clean.

“So dearest Shane, in the future, no bacon, ham, porkchops, ribs, or literally ANYTHING else that comes from a pig, can ever come into this house; you got it?”

With wide fearful eyes, Shane nodded, and scrubbed at the counters with much more ferocity than he had before. He didn’t know what it was Viola would do if she found out he had ordered bacon, but if she would leave the windows open during the daytime for Carmichael, or scatter silver shavings in the carpet, he wasn’t waiting to find out. He couldn’t put it past her to not bring a stranger through the apartment and into his room, or worse.

Viola came home about forty-five minutes after the start of the bacon fiasco. Carmichael had almost finished flushing the cleaning water down the toilet, Shane was vacuuming the carpet, and Tanya had just put new bags in both of the trash cans (after a fair amount of prompting). When her keys jingled outside the door, the entire apartment stood still. She pushed the door open to find her roommates all waiting for her with very uneasy smiles. She was quite sure it wasn’t her birthday.

“Hello…” she said as she came through the door and shuffled her shoes onto the rack.

They had all frozen in place, looking like awkwardly carved statues. Shane was in the very center of the living room. He had forgotten to turn off the vacuum, and had just stood there with it whirring until he realized that the noise wasn’t coming from inside his head.

“Oh, god,” he mumbled as he went to unplug it from the wall. The on/off button had stopped working months ago and was stuck in a perpetual state of “on” until removed from a power source.

Viola watched all of them. They looked suspicious, like a group of children who had broken their mother’s favorite lamp. The question was: where was the broken lamp?

“Is there something you’re all wanting to tell me?”

She sniffed the air, “why does it smell like bleach in here?”

Tanya sprang into action, “OH, Shane and I were unloading the grocery order and he dropped a jar. It broke and flew everywhere.”

Viola turned to Shane, to corroborate what Tanya had said.

He nodded, and followed up with, “yeah, it- it was a glass jar too. So um, that’s why I had to vacuum because, you know, some of the glass might have gotten into the carpet.”

It wasn’t a very convincing performance.

Ah! There was her lamp.

She set her purse down on the floor and took a step towards him.

“Was it one of my jars?” she asked.

Shane quickly shook his head and took a step back, “No, it was a jelly jar.”

Viola’s eyes narrowed. They were clearly hiding something. It was obvious. But so far, nothing seemed to be out of place. Sooner or later, it would become to light what had happened, and she would deal with it then.

“Okay, good… did we get all of the groceries put away?” she asked him.

Tanya interrupted. It was clear that with anymore pressure, Shane was going to crack and damn them all.

“No, there are only a couple of bags left, just the essentials”

Carmichael decided to contribute. He walked through the living room and sat himself on the couch in the most obnoxious way he could muster. He had hoped it would be distracting enough to end the conversation and allow for everyone move on. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Carmichael, why in God’s name are you awake at four o’clock in the afternoon?”

Viola stood with her hands on her hips. They had gone out of their way to clean up the mess, but in doing so had left a large hole in their cover. Shane refused to look up from his vacuum. He just stared at the cord as he wrapped it around the handle. If he looked any harder, he would’ve burned a hole into the plastic.

Luckily, despite his poor stage skills, Carmichael was an excellent everyday actor (or liar, if you wanted to call it that).

Without breaking a sweat, he replied:

“I woke up when I heard the glass break, and you know that big mouth over there can’t speak below a foghorn decibel.”

Tanya rolled her eyes and retreated into the kitchen to put away the rest of the groceries. Careful to avoid Viola’s eyes, Shane rolled the vacuum past her to go hide in his room.

“Tanya, have you come across any cinnamon? The first of the month is coming, and I asked Shane to put it on the list.” Viola said as she turned into the kitchen.

‘No, but there’s still one bag left on the counter if you want to look through it.”

Shane shut his door quietly behind him and heaved a sigh of relief. The past hour and a half of his life had been chaos, and he wanted nothing more than to just go to sleep and forget it all. Unfortunately, he still had at least another two hours at work before he could even begin to relax. He sat down in his office chair, nestled his headphones back over his ears, and brought the mic down. But just as he was about to log back into work, he heard a very loud voice boom through the apartment.

“Why in the absolute FUCK, is there bacon on this receipt?”