‘Just Another Date Night on the Highway Out of Town’ by Zandra Renwick

This girl Spider brought along on what he and I have been calling our weekly double-date hell night is so annoying because she’s saying stuff like, Of course I love pizza as much as everybody else, but is it gluten-free? So I’m looking at Spider sitting across from me in this raggy sliced-up Naugahyde booth in the back of what everybody on campus knows is the rankest late-night highway pizza dive in creation and I’m thinking, Spider, dude, it’s a fact we’re still friends despite you cheating on me, like, two years ago and me dumping your squeaky ass, but I know what you’ve got down those baggy pants of yours is nothing even close to gluten-free. Then I think maybe it’s all moot because his sad gluteny manbits never do actually pass her lips and then I start thinking, Joke’s on you, Spider; I may not be half as pretty as this girl but at least I always prided myself on giving decent reciprocal tit for what was, to be fair, your enthusiastic and sometimes not uncreative tat. 

I thank again the god I never believed in that I’m dating Shelly now, but it’s astounding I even have to point out the obvious fact for like the fifth time that, gluten-free or not, this effing pizza in front of us has a fake black-polished fingernail sticking straight up out of the centre, a pointy Halloween talon rising from soupy yellow cheese like a mini black obelisk from a mozzarella moor.

Turning the scratched plastic pitcher upside down to get the last dregs of un-gluten-free beer into my glass, I’m thinking, Okay, sure, it’s the middle of the week and the middle of the night and we’re in the middle of nowhere, but it’s still telling that we’re the only customers in this joint. I picture some idiot back there in the kitchen slinging dough into big metal ovens, not caring if her tacky vampire press-ons aren’t staying pressed. Figuring I’m the only one at the table with the balls or maybe the brains to go complain to management, I knock back my beer and kiss my girlfriend Shelly and stand. Shelly doesn’t seem to mind Spider’s idiot date, and they’re chattering away about manicures and gluten-free crusts, both shining examples of the kind of normal girl I will forever fail to be. I pretend not to be a little jealous as I heft our gross pizza and stomp over to the counter to complain about its surprise extra topping and try to weasel a free second pitcher on the house while they sling us up a new pie.

The guy behind the counter looks culled from a casting call for sleazy roadside diner characters, like some low-budget movie director needed a night fry cook for the kind of horror film my grandma watched at the drive-in over my granddaddy’s shoulder from the backseat—you know, like he’d gut you with a fillet knife or grind you up for burgers: stubble, bloodshot eyes, dirty white apron with stains the shapes of tiny continents or exposed internal organs straight out of used dollar-bin textbooks.

Excuse me, I tell him, but there’s a fake fingernail in the cheese in the middle of our pizza. Some kind of claw-looking thingy.