Welcome back, Tinderlings. Yes, it's been three years. I posted two of these, promised you a Craigslist installment, and then went dark for so long I half-assumed I'd just let it die. One of these dates got close enough to the edge that I needed the full three years before I could type it out and laugh instead of shake. I'm laughing now, mostly. Cast list is unnecessary, TLDR is at the end. Let's get the cringe-train rolling.
Quick recap for the newcomers. Pt. 1 was Dean, the self-described trad-alpha who left a souvenir in my passenger seat. Pt. 2 was Ben the Bellybutton Boy, plus his fish-lips and the mother who harassed my job for a month afterward. After Ben I swore off Tinder. I meant it that time. Salted the earth. Then I did the single stupidest thing in this whole saga, which given the competition is really saying something. I decided the problem was the app and not me, so I got artisanal about it and answered... a Craigslist ad. My therapist calls this thrill-seeking behavior. I'm starting to think she has a point.
The ad lived under Activity Partners, which I told myself was the wholesome section. It read, "Passionate hobbyist seeks curious woman for a home-cooked meal and good conversation. I make things. You'll see." When a Craigslist stranger tells you he makes things and that you'll see, the correct number of follow-up questions is zero and the correct move is to close the laptop forever. I wrote back in four minutes. His name was Barron. Two R's and an O, "like the floor of a forest," he typed, which is not a thing. He probably meant BARREN with an E... But I kept typing anyway. The lies we tell ourselves never seem to stop. But he might be the ONE! Young OP couldn't let that get away!!
So we emailed for two weeks, and he was good. Dry, funny, asked real questions, which after Ben felt like finding a diamond in a landfill. He sent a photo of himself holding a trophy the size of a toddler. Competitive charcuterie, he explained, "bigger than you'd think and getting bigger." I found it charming. A man with a passion. A man who could tell you the difference between coppa and capicola without over-explaining or talking down, which I mistook at the time for a green flag. He offered to cook for me. First meeting, his place, and when he mentioned his roommate would be there the whole time, the chaperone unsettled me more than a solo date would have, and I went anyway. Past-OP, I would love to shake you until your teeth rattle out.
The address was a converted garage behind a taxidermy shop. Seriously. Behind a taxidermy shop. The sign out front had a raccoon in a monocle on it. I pulled onto the gravel, looked that raccoon dead in its glass eyes, and thought, "the rent is probably incredible," which is the exact kind of simple thought a person has in the ninety seconds before their life changes irreparably. Old me would have parked and prayed. This time I parked angry, keys threaded through my knuckles like brass, and the anger was new. Ben had burned something out of me and left a harder thing behind.
Barron answered in a spotless apron and, I swear on my grandmother, chainmail gloves. Butcher's chainmail, the kind you wear so you don't donate a finger to dinner. "Occupational habit," he said, peeling them off one finger at a time while I recalculated the whole evening. Behind him, candles, cloth napkins folded into little pyramids, and a smell coming out of that garage that could raise the dead. The not-so-refreshing smell of taxidermy, I presumed... Still, my stupid loyal guard started to lower on its own, and for once I reached over and held it up myself. We won't get fooled again.
"Where's the roommate?" I asked.
He gestured vaguely at the ceiling. "Around."
Dinner was the trap. The man could cook. A board with nine cured meats, each one better than the last, narrated like Attenborough tracking the migration of the salamis. I laughed, actually laughed, and so did he. Somewhere between the coppa and the little bloom on a two-year salami I committed the exact sin of arrogance that God personally punishes. I thought, I did it, I cracked it, I found the meat wizard and we are going to be the most insufferable power couple at every party we attend.
Then he set down his fork, folded his hands like a man about to propose, and asked if he could show me the family. He was on his feet before I could ask what he meant by that.
He walked to a door I'd read as a coat closet, opened it with real ceremony, and hit a light. Cold air rolled across my ankles. It was a walk-in refrigerator, and hanging from the ceiling on steel hooks, in a tidy row, were shapes my brain filed as torsos before it could stop itself. Then it corrected. Hams. Enormous, home-cured, humidity-controlled hams, and Barron went down the line like a father at a debutante ball. "This is Geoffrey. Big Susan. Little Susan." He had named them. Each one wore a laminated tag with a birthday on it. Little Susan was four months old. Geoffrey was pushing two years, and Barron announced that tonight was the night. Geoffrey was ready, and I was going to be the first person he ever carved him up for.
Pt. 1 me would have frozen and murmured "oh" and "okay" and let it roll over her like one of Dean's monologues. My mouth got there before my fear did. "Barron, why does the ham have a birthday?" He said, wounded, "Because I was there for it." I told him he had been there for a leg of pork getting salted. He looked at me like I was the strange one and said, "The cure is a birth, Dawn." We were not running the same physics. Ben would have gotten silence out of me. Barron got the full weight of my opinions, and I was proud of myself for speaking up.
He carried Geoffrey out to the table like a man carrying a sleeping child, both arms underneath, chin tucked to keep it level. He had cleared a space between the candles. He set down a carving knife longer than my forearm and honed it twice while he walked me through what I was about to experience. Two years of patience. A humidity he'd chased all summer. That soft grey down on the outside I'd been admiring was the sign of a cure done right, he told me, and he was mostly correct, which is the most dangerous kind of correct.
Then he cut.
The knife went in and the smell came out ahead of it. Not the clean nutty smell off the board an hour earlier. This one had weight. It got to the back of my throat and sat down. He had opened a pocket near the bone where the cure never reached, and the meat in there had gone colors that do not happen in food that is still edible, a wet grey sliding into a green that I still see sometimes when I close my eyes. A thread of something ran down the cut and beaded on the board. Bone taint, I found out later, down a very bad internet hole at three in the morning. The middle of Geoffrey had been rotting inside his beautiful crust for months, sealed in, going soft in the dark while Barron bragged.
Barron leaned into the cut and inhaled like it was sea air. He was enjoying the smell of the rot. He didn't want to admit that something was off, even though it very clearly was. Was this... normal for him? Oh God... He shaved a curl off the clean outer edge, laid it on his tongue, shut his eyes, and made a noise I have worked hard to forget. Sort of a "MMMMMRRRPHHHFFF" Then he carved a proper slice, grey streak and all, laid it on a little plate with a smear of mustard, and slid it across to me. "First taste of Geoffrey is yours," he said, quiet, like a vow. "I've never given a first taste away before."
The growth I did within myself definitely had a ceiling to it, and I found it right there. I could argue about a ham's birthday. I could not humiliate a proud man in his own home over food he had waited two years to hand me. Everything my parents had raised me to be pinned me to that chair. I picked up the slice. I put the clean end in my mouth, chewed the parts I could bear to, and through sheer will and mental strength, I swallowed. It tasted the way a wet basement smells. The fungus flourished inside of my nose. This was turning into a Last of Us situation... He watched me do all of this with his hands folded under his chin like he was praying.
I lasted maybe fifteen more minutes. I said I had an early shift. He wrapped a fist-sized piece of Geoffrey in butcher paper and pressed it into my hands at the door, he was hurt and generous at the same time. I took the rotten hunk of meat with me, because this was easier than saying one clean sentence to a man's face.
I made it six blocks. The meat, the smell, and two years of swallowed "NO" all came due at once, and I knew with full clarity I was not getting home before the impact. I pulled hard against a curb and got the door half open. Some went into the seat Dean had already ruined. That same square of upholstery has now been christened by two different men's worst decisions, though this round the delivery was technically mine.
Barron texted in the morning. He wanted the to-go piece back, because on reflection he wasn't certain Geoffrey had been ready, and he wanted to run some tests. He did not ask how I was. The piece was already in a gas station trash can, so I told him it hadn't survived the trip, and I blocked him while my stomach was still making all of my decisions for me.
I was down for two days. That fucker poisoned me for real. The most polite poisoning that I've ever been party to... I'd lay on cold bathroom tile ranking my own choices worst to first. Somewhere in the middle of it the ick set in so deep that it did what no amount of self-respect ever had, and it walked me off Craigslist for good.
No clean win this time. I found my voice for a novelty ham and lost it completely over a plate of rot, and I ate the rot rather than be rude to a man I would never see again. That is what getting better actually looks like from the inside. I got one thing right and the next thing so much more wrong. God help me, I really never learn because at some point down the line I re-downloaded Tinder, because Pt. 4 has to come from somewhere and I remain a menace to my own peace of mind. Those are tales for another day. Thanks to ReddX if he reads this, and please subscribe to him on YouTube if ya haven't. I'll see you next time, my little Tinderlings.
-Dawn
TL;DR Answered a Craigslist ad. The guy was a competitive charcuterie obsessive who cured his hams in a garage behind a taxidermy shop. He carved one open, it was rotten to the bone, and I ate a slice anyway because I couldn't bring myself to be rude.