My short story, “Service Area,” at the Rumpus (with illustrations!)
Tom was on glory hole duty and Ericka was doing the dog shit, so when Crystal went on break, she went out back by herself and lay in the lettuce bags with one of the pamphlets from the Info Kiosk, a pamphlet for the Akron Zoo, a place with things like tigers and fruit bats and penguins that were sort of like dogs and the deer they sometimes saw, but not like dogs and deer at all. Soon her shift would be over and she’d use the time allotted for art-making to work on her sock puppets, and then she’d meet up with Tom and Ericka for dinner and hear all about their day, and if she was lucky, after Ericka had fallen asleep, she and Tom would take a long walk around the perimeter fence and make out behind the dumpsters.
