What should I do with the jar in my fridge?

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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/niceynice876 on 2024-11-13 14:28:31+00:00.

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I'm writing this here because I don't know what else to do.

Let me start from the start. I lived with my two roommates, Carmen and James, in a typical apartment off-campus. The three of us shared a fridge, and space was pretty tight, but we'd worked out as good system to avoid disagreements—ensuring that each of us had our own shelf, and anything in other areas of the fridge was labelled.

Carmen and James had been living in the apartment for a semester prior to me moving in, and while I was worried initially that the two of them might be cliquey, they were very welcoming. Both of them were straight-talking and adult without being rude or blunt, which was so refreshing after my experiences with some terrible roommates in places I'd lived before.

Everything was going smoothly—no moldy food, leftovers kept on our personal shelves, and boundaries respected. That was until the morning I opened the fridge, bleary-eyed and looking for coffee creamer, and found a weird jar on my shelf.

What looked like gnarled roots were suspended in cloudy liquid that swirled as I examined the jar in my hand. The jar was old-fashioned, sealed with a two-part canning lid that seemed stuck tight. I'd never seen Carmen or James have anything like in the fridge this before, and in my mind I groped around for rationale as to how this could have showed up. As I struggled to open the lid, it finally loosened, not with the fresh pop of a sterile jar, but with the gritty sensation of corroded metal loosening its grip on rust. This jar looked like it had been here for years. I quickly screwed it shut again, not wanting to experience the smell of what was inside.

My fingers ran over something that felt like paper on the bottom of the jar. I checked that the lid was on tight before turning over the jar. There, on the base, was a dog-eared label with words written in old-fashioned cursive: "To bind".

“Did either of you buy this?” I asked Carmen and James, but they both said no, barely paying attention. “If someone’s messing with me, just stop. It’s not funny,” I told them both, but neither of them took responsibility. It was too early to argue, so I shrugged and threw the whole jar in the trash.

The next week or so, nothing else weird happened, and I started to forget about the jar that had shown up in the fridge. That was until the morning that James yelled my name from across the house.

"EMMA!" he shouted, and I immediately jumped up and headed downstairs to see what the matter was. It wasn't like him to randomly yell for me, and I could tell by his tone that something was wrong.

James was stood by the fridge, his face twisted into an expression of disgust. "Emma, what the fuck is this?", he shouted, as he opened the door.

I jumped back as he revealed the fridge was crawling with maggots. Their pale, segmented bodies were pulsing in sick rhythm as they wriggled up the inside walls of the fridge, each one swollen with a glistening sheen. In the center of the fridge was a mass of maggots in writhing clusters, and I realized with horror that they were concentrated around my box of leftover pizza—the pizza I'd ordered just the night before.

"Emma, answer me! What the fuck is this?"

I was frozen with disgust, and my voice sounded stuttery and weak. "I don't know, James... this has nothing to do with me, I swear!"

"Then why the fuck are they coming from your pizza box?"

I recoiled as James grabbed my box of pizza, seemingly so full of anger and adrenaline that he didn't care about the maggots crawling all over it, which scattered to the floor around our feet. The air puffed with spores that made me cough as he opened the lid, the once-cheesy slices nearly unrecognizable—swollen with mold, shades of green, black, and white spreading across the surface in fuzzy patches. Some spots seemed slick and slimy, others looked almost bubbly. Amid the rotting mess, maggots swarmed over each slice, their pale bodies weaving in and out of the gooey, decomposing crust. The air was filled with the dense, sour stench of decay and whispery, wet squelching of their bodies sliding against each other.

The sight of the decay inside the box was so shocking that I almost didn't notice the message on the inside of the lid, scrawled in harsh, capital letters: "ENJOY WHILE IT LASTS".

James tilted the box to look at the message. "What does this mean, Emma?"

"I don't know! The pizza was fresh, that message wasn't there last night..."

"So you're saying that me or Carmen must have done this? Why the fuck would we want to nuke our own fridge with maggots?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying! This is so fucked up..."

James' eyes were full of a hard rage that I hadn't seen before, and I was almost as scared of him as I was of the maggots. "I don't even want to hear how this happened. It's your mess, clean it up, and you need to replace all of our food that's been ruined by this. This is unbelievable Emma, I really thought we could trust you." He threw the pizza box on the counter and stormed from the room.

I cleaned it all up, filling up trash bags while crying with frustration and fear. I was so confused—there had been no hint of any decay when I'd eaten the pizza last night, and I'd simply thrown the leftovers in the fridge thinking I'd eat them later today. I didn't have the money to buy an entire fridge's worth of food for three people, and I was sick with worry that my living situation was descending into the same mess of hostility that I'd experienced before.

I spent about an hour on my knees in my rubber gloves, scooping up handfuls of maggots and dumping them in boiling water to kill them, then scrubbing the fridge with bleach. Neither James nor Carmen mentioned the incident to me again, although both of them had noticeably cooled towards me, and I spent as much time in my room as I could to avoid any awkward confrontations. Each time I opened the fridge, I braced myself, terrified that something else would appear.

And I was right to be afraid, because a few nights later, it happened again.

I opened the fridge to grab a snack, only to find a plate on my shelf, front and center. On it was a slice of cake sat upright with a candle on the top, as if ready to present to a birthday girl. But the cake was old-looking, sagging and sunken. It looked kind of familiar—frosting a sickly shade of green, surrounded by hardened crumbs, and speckled with confetti-like sprinkles. My stomach dropped as I noticed the letters scrawled across the top in smeared icing. The first few letters of my name. EMM…

It was unmistakably the same cake from my tenth birthday. I remembered that the frosting was a hideous shade of green because my mom had added too much food coloring. How could a slice of it be here, now, almost a decade later?

“Emma?” Carmen’s voice cut sharply through my thoughts, and I jumped. She was standing in the doorway, arms crossed. I felt like I'd been caught red-handed, guilty of some crime I had no part in, and I tried to use my body to block the cake. But the look in my eyes must have told her that there was something wrong.

“What now?” she asked, walking over to the fridge and peering over my shoulder. Her eyes widened as she spotted the plate, and her mouth curled in disdain. “You can’t seriously expect us to believe this isn’t yours.”

“What? No, I—” I stammered, trying to find the right words, but she cut me off.

“James told me about the maggots, and now this? A slice of rotten cake with your name on it?” Her eyes were cold and sharp with accusation. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, Emma, but it’s sick.”

“I swear, Carmen, I didn’t put this here!” I said, my voice filled with desperation. “I have no idea how any of this is happening!”

She snorted, folding her arms tighter. “You’re telling me that a weird cake with your name on it just magically appeared in our fridge? Do you even hear how insane that sounds?”

“I know how it sounds,” I whispered. My voice was brittle with shame. “But I’m not doing this. I haven’t done any of it.”

Carmen shook her head. Her face with was filled with disappointment, her eyes wrinkled with disgust, like she was contemplating a stranger doing something unsanitary. I'd hoped that some fragile trust was still there, but each syllable she spoke tore it down. “We were actually happy when you moved in. We thought you’d be different. But you’ve brought nothing but weirdness into our home. First the maggots, and now this? James and shouldn't have to live with constant gross surprises in the fridge.”

“Carmen, please. You have to believe me.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” she snapped. “We’re going to have to reconsider this whole living arrangement.”

Later that night I lay in bed, unable to sleep, replaying the argument with Carmen over and over in my head. I felt like I was going crazy, but I knew I wasn't responsible for this. Every other area of my life was healthy and happy. All I could think, unlikely as it seemed, was that James or Carmen were playing a trick on me. I didn't feel safe, I couldn't face a confrontation with them, and even if I could, our relationship would be forever tainted by what had happened.

I needed to talk to someone who might have an outside perspective on all this. I picked up my phone and called my mom.

“Hi, sweetheart!” She sounded cheerful at first, but her tone shifted when she heard the strain in my voice. “Emma? Is everything okay?”

I he...

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