By Charles Michael Pawluk
Sam’s father said it was about time he got a goddamn job and helped out around here.
During his first shift a bleary-eyed kid waddled up to him. For some reason his shirt was wet.
“Uh,” said the kid.
Sam didn’t look up. He was trying to learn the register.
“Someone threw up in the bathroom, I think.”
Sam stared at him for a few seconds, like what do you want me to do about it, but the kid just kept standing there, so Sam walked over to his manager and told her what he had learned.
She told him to take care of it as soon as possible. Can’t have the place looking that way. Bad for business.
He couldn’t remember what he did then. He probably laughed in disbelief.
But he cleaned it up. It was in the urinal. It took a long time.
Charles Michael Pawluk’s fiction appears in Witness and Faultline and his scholarship appears or is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Buffalo and teaches in Annapolis, MD.
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