As our guest, please feel free to help yourself to anything. I didn’t run to the store before your arrival, because as you can see, my pantry is overflowing with foodstuffs.
Oh, crackers? An excellent appetizer choice. Those go really well with this jar of local strawberry jam I picked up at—well, that’s interesting. It’s all just been scraped right out of there with a spork, hasn’t it?
I know it was a spork because the top’s broken off inside the empty jar, which was placed right back on the shelf, as if its contents were still available for consumption.
The crackers are gone too? Perplexing. Yes, I see the box in your hand. The way it was torn open across the back, as if shredded by a feral raccoon, was hard to notice until you picked it up. From the shelf. Where it had been perched, delicately, like something that still contained crackers.
No matter. There’s plenty more to choose from. How about cereal? I just picked up this whole shelf of—
Wow, every single box?
Every. Single. Goddamn. Box?
Just sitting there in a row, empty? Like some kind of Stonehenge monument to the memory of a grocery list I fulfilled—let me think—yesterday?
That can’t be right. Why would someone—perhaps someone who responded “No, bruh” when asked if anything was needed at the store—consume every food in the house, but then leave its near-intact packaging behind?
It’s like some young spider you’d see in a nature documentary, sucking the inside out of a fly. Only afterward, that spider tucks the fly’s hollowed-out carcass somewhere nonsensical, where it can become some other spider’s problem.
Some other, older, tired spider, who just invited a friend over on a whim. Maybe because it was hoping for a few moments of conversation with another spider who doesn’t give a shit about Minecraft.
And maybe it thought, “Hey, we can be just a couple of middle-aged spiders for an hour on a Thursday evening, maybe talk about a book with no pictures that isn’t The Book with No Pictures, and share a few snacks.”
It doesn’t seem like that hangry spider—the one who pays for the snacks and the shelves and the pantry and the mortgage for the house they’re all shoved into—is expecting too much, does it?
It shouldn’t be a big ask for that spider to find the small gift box of clearance Valentine’s Godiva chocolates where she fucking left it, in the empty light-bulb carton, behind the old lunchmeat box full of spare batteries. Not devoured and tucked under a ripped-open bag of pickle-flavored jellybeans. Right?
Yes, they exist, and yes, they’re a joke, and hell yes, they’re revolting, but they also appear to be the only edible substance left in this house. So feel free to chow down.
Do you like socks? Our dog seems to find them tasty, so maybe you and I can gnaw on a couple of the sixty-seven grubby tubes I’ve found crumpled in here so far. You know what they say: Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food. I’m sure these socks are probably 86 percent penicillin at this point. That must be why someone keeps discarding them in here, next to food, just like the proper place to put dirty shoes is on the dining room table.
No, of course I won’t make you—a friend I invited over, when making friends as an adult is impossible—snack on socks. Not even clean ones! As if there were such a thing in this house.
How do you feel about olives? I’m the only one who loves them, and I’ve got a jar stashed for nights that I’ve fed everyone dinner and don’t have a single surviving brain cell left to think about dinner for myself.
Which is to say, every night.
So, yeah, we’re out of olives too.
Okay. We can still pull this thing together. Let me do what I do the rest of the day when I’m starving and don’t have food: paw through my back-busting work tote for smooshed protein bars.
Success! I have a half-eaten Kind bar, a Slim Jim, and a room-temperature string cheese that I can’t remember ever putting in here.
You’re right. That’s the closest thing I’ve had to a charcuterie board in years. If I plate them on this forgotten promotional frisbee and add a few decorative Tic Tacs, it’s practically happy hour at Chez Panisse.
I’m so glad we did this. It’s really nice to sit down on the washer and dryer together, nibble on room-temperature dairy, and hide from my children with you. We should do this more often.
And yes, I did get dragged to the Minecraft movie. I know, I know. Jason Momoa. I saw. I’m confused too.
You’re right. I guess I do give a fuck or two, after all.