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I was eighteen, had just graduated from the tiny high school in my tiny town, and was moving into an apartment with a lifelong friend that afternoon. His name was Tim, and I would soon be losing my deposit due to him.

I had boxed up the few belongings I had gathered over the two years I had lived in my father's basement. My clothes were on hangers and in suitcases. When the time came, I carried my stuff through the hot, desert day and got it all in my old Ford Fairmont in one load.

An hour later I was helping my friend get his stuff into the apartment. Two young men in white shirts and ties appeared and offered to help; we knew who they were and rebuffed them quickly. A year and a half later I was one of them!

In any case, by the end of that hot day that had smelled, as many of the days in this small town do, of manure, we were moved in.

I reveled in my freedom. Rent was cheap and the apartment was big. I had my own room and a kitchen that my roommate had vowed he would never use, except for the microwave. I stocked the fridge with all sorts of goodies and had a ball cooking my inventions for the first few weeks.

It began one morning as I got ready to go to my job flipping burgers at the locally owned fast food joint in our town. I was late, so I snagged a breakfast burrito from the freezer and ripped it open, popping the microwave door. Yuck. A half-eaten chicken sandwich was moldering in there. It looked to have been in the nuker for a few days. Making faces at the dead, wet smell and the limp nastiness of it all, I used a sandwich baggie as a glove and discarded the specimen. I was already too late and I didn't have time to clean out the microwave, so I put my frozen breakfast back into the freezer and went to work hungry and revolted.

A few days later it happened again, but this time the sandwich was on the counter, half falling out of its yellow wrapper. I saw it when I walked in after a date. Ugh. Why wouldn't he throw his stuff away?

I went to Tim's room and kicked in the door. It was already ajar and I could see he was playing a video game, so I wasn't being dramatic. "Tim," I said, "dude, what's with the half-eaten sandwiches?"

"Oh, I'm gonna eat that. Just had to do this."

I nodded to the back of his shaggy head and decided to leave it.

The sandwich stayed on the counter for three days. I kid you not. I tried to be strong, tried to leave it to him so that he could learn responsibility. He won and I ended up using a double layer of baggies on the oozing thing.

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