Free Sex and Bacon by Sarah Katherine Lewis Page B

my experience of the project. I needed to be able to pay attention. The BO could be a subtle point, easily missed. I couldn’t afford to take that chance.
    I started out with a cold pan on my stove-top. I laid five strips of bacon across the bottom of the pan, pushing them together with a fork, neat and flat, into broad pink-and-white pork ribbons. They were slightly too long for the pan, and their edges curled up on each side. I was mildly annoyed by the crimped edges—it didn’t look precise—but I used my fork to press the too long edges against the sides of the skillet, and they adhered with their own fat quite nicely. It would have to do.
    I turned the burner on to medium-high. Actually, just past medium. There’s a certain bacon-friendly setting my hand knows better than my brain, because if I just kind of flick the knob in a certain way it goes to Perfect Bacon Temperature and my bacon cooks into delicious salty crusty strips of goodness. But if I overthink the temperature my pan ends up too hot or too cool. So with a twist of the wrist, loose and casual, in about three minutes the bacon started to creak as the brine in which it had been packed burned off against the hot cast iron.
    About a minute after that I smelled it. The bacon smell. That rich, caramelized scent of sizzling salt-pork belly. That unfair smell. The one that tells you that a double order—bacon with your starch-heavy meal, plus another side of bacon—isn’t enough. The one that vegetarians shamefully make allowances for, asking for bacon in restaurants while maintaining pristinely meat-free homes.
    Each strip’s fatty sections swelled and curled coyly in the pan, making seductive popping noises. Shhhhhh , the bacon whispered, promising discretion. I was hungry and excited, an ardent lover. Finally, enough bacon! I couldn’t wait for the first batch to finish.
    I opened my cabinet and took out a dinner plate, which I lined with a double layer of paper towels. Then I speared each strip of bacon with my fork and laid them side by side on their paper towel bed. I finished by gently tucking another paper towel over the bacon strips, as if wishing them a good night’s rest and pleasant dreams. Grease-flowers blossomed as I pressed the towel down, careful as a mama seeing to her babies.
    Turning back to the grease-coated skillet, I used my fingers to lay five more strips down. I believe in touching bacon. I am a meat-toucher. Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t use raw meat to clean my countertops, and I wouldn’t lick uncooked pork or suck the drippings from those weird little sanitary napkin thingies they put under cut-up fryers in the Styrofoam trays to absorb the smelly chicken water. But I believe in touching meat—using my fingers to lay down bacon or dredge chunks of stew meat in flour. If meat were really that dangerous, wouldn’t we all be sick constantly from eating it? Frankly it seemed to me that supermarket mushrooms—raised in shit, then dumped out into trays to be pawed through by dozens of indifferently washed shoppers —-were likely filthier than nice, clean meat wrapped in butcher’s plastic and consistently refrigerated.
    Or maybe I just liked touching meat. The cool slap of it and the soft meat-grease on my fingertips. The smell of it—feral, coppery, intimate, oily. The watery blood. The raw animal-meat-fiber striations of beef; smooth, shiny egg-yolky chicken breasts; even the little worms of raw ground beef were sensual in their own way when you slapped them into hamburger-size pads or used your fingers to squish eggs and cracker crumbs and ketchup into meat-loaves. So I used my fingers to lay the next series of bacon strips down, peeling them away from the mam block of candy-striped meat with my nails.
    This time they began crackling and pushing up into little pork bumps and valleys immediately—the salty water hissing, the grease from the previous batch spattering slightly—and I felt pinpricks of hot oil on my