Okay, well not today, it was a while ago, but i didn't know about reddit or TIFU at the time. First a little backstory. At the time this happened I was crashing with an old friend in the country outside of Nashville, Tn. We didn't have a lotta money, and the house was mostly occupied by the members of a full time rock band, full time meaning that they had gone in together on this place in the middle of nowhere where they could practice at anytime they felt like and be as loud as they wanted. We called the place the bamboo house because it was surrounded by what seemed like a few acres of rivercane that was, in some places, over 15 ft high. There were paths throughout the bamboo that wound around like a maze leading back to a fire pit. That is if you didn't get lost. We essentially were surviving on a steady diet of bad blues rock, coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, and if we felt like splurging, a little caesar's hot n ready pizza every now and then. now, the night before the event in question was a particularly long/ great one, filled with drinking and laughter and singing and more drinking followed by one of the worst hangovers I have ever had.
So when I woke up to a knock at the door, around 1 in the afternoon mind you, I want you to understand my frame of mind; hungover, exhausted, possibly dehydrated and certainly malnourished. I was not in top form. I lit a refry and opened the door to see a short, paunchy, old redneck in overalls, with a big white (read: yellowish) beard and a trucker cap pulled down almost over his eyes. He said he was a junk man, and that he had seen some scrap and old appliances laying about the place and wanted to know if he could haul them off. Neither of these things was unusual. The house and surrounding jungle of bamboo was littered with old washing machines, lawnmowers, air conditioners, an engine block of some kind and other various broken things, like a lot of rural properties in the south, and the same decay was often picked up and carried away by "junkers" who would, and still, sell their bounty to scrapyards for pennies on the pound, cleaning the countryside and lining their pockets. Beneficial to everyone, but not being the actual renter and only a guest, I had enough of a brain cell firing to call for my friend and make sure it was alright before giving the guy the ok. So now there are two of us, hung over and bedraggled trying to work out if the owner of the property would mind if some old dude took away their rusty trash.
We finally decided they wouldn't and the old redneck asked if we could help him load up since he would have a difficult time of it by himself.
Now, we were in no condition to help with much, but out of common decency we offered to give him a hand anyhow.
This is where it starts to get weird. I urge you to remember, I just woke up, I'm still wiping sleep crud out of my eyes, this is about as substantial as a dream to me and is making about as much sense, so I don't wanna hear any "don't go in there!" horror movie, "you should have known better" bullshit. My friend and I are doing the best we can just to stand up straight.
The old man starts walking into the maze of river cane and motions us to follow. He seems to have a pretty good idea where he's going and is passing up a lot of "prime junk" as it were. He stops at a clearing, a place he couldn't have seen from the rad like he had said, and starts kicking some leaves up until he finds the edge of a plywood board. We helped him pull it up revealing a refrigerator in a hole. A refrigerator tied shut with a garden hose. We picked it up out of the earth and I remember thinking that the shelves must have come loose because I could feel and hear them shaking around inside as we pulled it upright. Then I remember thinking how weird it was that the shelves and drawers were actually in the hole underneath where the fridge had been. Also it seemed unusually heavy, but I don't carry a lot of refrigerators so maybe I wouldn't know.
Understand, I'm writing this from the future, so I clearly see now how all of these things should have been setting off some huge red fucking flags, the very least of which was the piece of twine which dangled a rusted fork from the door handle of the damned thing. BUT at the time all I wanted was to get back to sleep. My friend must have felt the same because we didn't nope the fuck outta there and call the cops. We didn't ask a single question, we just carried the refrigerator back to the old man's pickup truck and slid it onto the bed.
It wasn't until he pulled away and we were left standing in the drive that the reality of the situation finally started to wash over us. THE FUCK DID WE JUST DO? I remember staring at my friend and back towards the road in utter confusion trying to piece it all together. Maybe it's better that we were as incoherent as we were. That we didn't think to ask any questions. Out of a morbid curiosity I still wonder what exactly was in that refrigerator. I tell myself, maybe it was something perfectly innocent, but I know that it can't be.
What the fuck was it?
Submitted February 13, 2015 at 05:01PM by popartandsoda http://ift.tt/1AiiHE9 tifu
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