In McDonald’s

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 35: FALL/WINTER 2025

You know Ticket 200. The man at the counter ordering three McGriddles, two coffees, three hash browns, hotcakes, and a yogurt. You watch the edge of his face as you slump deeper into the booth by the windows where you and a friend split a hash brown. 

“He’s the guy,” you say, nodding toward him. 

She squeezes the guts out of a ketchup. Red.

“They look hollow, like things that live underground and have finally come up.”

His family—they must be—walks in the door, gripping their coats as they slip into a booth across the cafeteria. They look hollow, like things that live underground and have finally come up. You recognize his son—though he’s much older now—from a photo you’d once seen in 200’s wallet. Kneeling in the dirt beside home plate with a Louisville Slugger in his left hand. Bowl cut. Missing tooth. Orange T-shirt. Orange socks. 

“We should follow him home,” your friend says. “Burn down his house, kill his wife, the baby—something.” Bad ideas. 

Baby? Somehow you hadn’t noticed. His wife rocks it in a basket made of her arms. The bright dome of her scalp is shining through her thinning hair. Her eye sockets are two dark rooms. She looks twice your age, probably is. Two years ago, sliding off a condom, he told you he would never have another kid. Maybe you never really knew him? You were a fetish. You were a toy. 

Someone’s little boy stands up in the booth in front of yours, blocking your view. He has Powerade blue gums and his jacket is puffed up like chips at high altitude. 

“Sit,” his mom says. “Eat your cheeseburger.” 

He presses his whole body into the glass, frozen like Han Solo.  

“Sit.” 

Crossing the cafeteria with the three McGriddles, two coffees, three hash browns, hotcakes, and a yogurt, Ticket 200 smiles at the little boy. His thin lips spread like grease. Come closer. Don’t. You’re not sure which. 

“Did he see you?” your friend asks.

“I don’t think so,” you say.

“What are you going to do?” she says.

You tear open another ketchup, because it feels good to tear something. 

 “Seven to nine inches by lunch,” comes out of the TV above, from a man in a poorly fitting suit. A McDonald’s employee appears beside you, picking a wedgie out of her black slacks with one hand, holding the remote in the other. Snowzilla runs on a ticker across the bottom of the screen. Volume 37, 38, 39. 

“Tired of this shit,” the McDonald’s employee mutters under her breath. We all watch the TV with great purpose—even the baby—as pink and blue morph like disease over the tadpole-turning-frog shape of West Virginia. Flurries rain down on the TV and outside, and you wonder which are more real.

“McFlurries,” you say, glued to the screen. 

Your friend laughs, arpeggiating her long lime-green nails.

Commercial. Toothpaste. Teeth. “Everyone deserves a perfect smi—” 

The McDonald’s woman mutes the TV and disappears into the silver-beeping kitchen. 

You look back at Ticket 200. His eyes flit away. He looks again, a frame of his green eyes. It feels worse than you thought it would. Like your insides on a pogo stick. And now. Now you can’t breathe.

You wash your face under the bathroom’s twitching fluorescence, shrugging off inevitable glimpses in the mirror: the narrow hips, wide shoulders, boy cut, emptied eyes. You feel it watching you. You feel it in your jaw. The hinge. 

“It’s not really you,” you whisper to the droplets of water falling from your hair.  

 You hear your old therapist sounding out for you—de-per-son-a-li-za-tion—with her expensive tongue. 

“Try to work out life as a man,” she’d prescribed.

“It doesn’t work like that,” you’d said, raising your voice. “There’s either her or de-per-son-a-li-za-tion.”

You splash more water on your face. You count to five while your molars continue to pulverize one another. You lose count. Try again. 

The bathroom door bangs open and you feel him yank down your jeans. He mounts you at the sink, where the faucet is still streaking white. He crashes inside you, in and out like a piston, faster, faster till you drift up the walls, become the ceiling. You can feel his tongue all over your ear. Those words again: “You wanna be a woman so bad, you can get fucked like one. You wanna be a woman so bad, you can get fucked like one.” He repeated it like a curse. You were sixteen. He was thirty-six. You splash more water on your face, stick your head under the hand warmer, close your eyes, press the button, freefall. 

Two old men in star-spangled hats and camo have replaced Blue Gums and his mother. They stroke their senior coffees and discuss hydraulic lines. “You might could use a two-wire hose.”

You pull your hoodie up to avoid being clocked and sit back down in the booth across from your friend.

“You okay?” she asks.

“I’m fine,” you say, looking back at his booth, where they eat in silence against the falling snow. Egg dangles from his son’s biscuit like a hangman’s tongue. He’s that gross age now. Maybe fourteen? 

“You’re staring,” your friend says.

You wave her off. 

The baby cries and he deals with it. Sits down, stands up, sits back down, stands back up. It reminds you of Sundays, when he was so afraid of cumming in his church jeans. 

“Fuck,” your friend says, popping to a stand, her gut pushing the tray. Her shift piercing ears at Claire’s was supposed to begin ten minutes ago. She gets to wear a lanyard around her neck and a pink-and-blue flag on a pin. Let trans kids bloom! on another. 

“Tomorrow you will get on a bus to New York City. You will actually do it this time. You will never come back.”

In the window, you watch as your reflection busses your tray. You swear your arms look bigger than they did yesterday. You miss the way they looked on hormones. Tomorrow you will get on a bus to New York City. You will actually do it this time. You will never come back. Never have to see him again.  

Outside, his white truck fills an entire parking space. Blackwater Asphalt Paving & Sealing is decalled on the doors. You loved getting into it to float over this town, late at night, protected, like a charm, as if everything else was a bad dream and you, you were real. You whisper into your friend’s ear as you walk to the door.

“That’s his truck.” 

“Don’t look at it,” she says, grabbing your hand. 

The sky is a gray lid and the ground is already covered in snow. Everything is the same three colors. Dead trees paint the hill behind McDonald’s in vertical brushstrokes. Headlights wrap around the drive-thru one after another. You turn to see if he’s watching, if he’s afraid that you’ll leave, but can’t tell either way. Your jeans held your ass differently on hormones. You wonder if he can tell the difference. 

You and your friend split her last oxy in the parking lot as the snow pellets your clothes. 

“Gravel daddy hasn’t budged,” she says, watching the windows, biting the pill into halves. Hers is bigger than yours; she gives you her mittens because your hands are cold; you hug; she leaves, walking in the direction of the mall; you smoke a short you find in the parking lot while eyeing his truck through the falling snow. 

You walk over to it. You hoist yourself up the foot rails, holding the driver’s side door, breathe onto his window, write I MISS YOU in the fog. Is he even what you miss? your friends would challenge. Or is it the bedazzled flare jeans and lacey camis you (stupidly) burned on a grill at the park. The lingerie you could never take yourself seriously in. The press-on plastic nails and ridiculous blond wig. He paid for all of it. The waist trainer. Your food. The “girl juice.” 200 mg Spiro. 6 mg E. 100 mg progesterone. He drove all the way to Ohio for it. He had you like a pet the way he rattled those pills. Voicemails you missed asleep in Biology. 

How bad do you want them? Rattle.

Isn’t she what you miss? your friends would say, waving their hands in front of your face. Who you miss? Her. You.

You see the reflection of an ear in his window, your ear, a thicket of your curly black hair, your broken fucking face, like that hag inside. You search for a rock. A big one. You dig through the snow by a row of bushes dividing the parking lot from the drive-thru, and find a rock shaped like a brick. It actually is a brick. You pick it up, stand up too quickly, wait, breathe. Oxy does this to you. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” 200 shouts from the door of McDonald’s. 

You shuffle through the snow toward his truck. 

“Hey! Hey!” he warns, but the wind softens his voice to a dull point. 

His boy comes bursting out of McDonald’s behind him. 

“You need to put that down,” Ticket 200 says, running toward you. 

“Make me,” you say, catching your breath, wishing you had said something else. He reaches for the brick-carrying arm of your jacket but is imprecise and you jerk it away, so he goes for the other. You’re almost surprised when he touches you that he really does—that he’s really there at all. 

“Get off me,” you say, trying to regain your balance. 

You lock shoulders, forming a dome, and your shoes slide around on the ice beneath the snow.

His boy yells encouragement. “Beat her ass” and things like that. The Christmas lights wrapping McDonald’s blur to quick gold lines. A car honks. 200 does a swim maneuver to get a better angle on you, gives you all his weight, and topples you into the snow, coming down on you like he used to in bed. 

You want him to stay, to feel his chest gassed on your back, feel his body peel away from yours like the plastic they put on new TVs. The rush of cool air that filled the space between, chilled your fuck sweat to jelly. 

You turn to face him, as he takes the brick from you and slides it through the snow. You smell the tar in his clothes. You say his name, “Patrick,” and he startles like a flushed grouse. 

“I’ll fucking kill you,” he says, clenching your hoodie, lifting your torso a centimeter off the ground. Your lips wilt and open. He hovers his fist an inch from your face. “I will fucking kill you,” he says letting go, baptizing you back into the snow. He stands, fixes his toboggan, and walks back to his boy, who at some point must have picked up the brick. 

He looks like he wants a chest bump from dad. A “good job.” A high five. 200 walks past him without a word, disappears back inside McDonald’s. 

His boy stays behind, hatred steaming off him in vapors. You are the reason men snicker at the gas pumps, women whisper at church—shake their heads, no. Please God no. You are the reason this kid is standing in a McDonald’s parking lot clutching a brick. 

You sit up and brush the fleece of snow off your hoodie and jeans. Inside McDonald’s, his family and others watch. His mom yells from the door.

“Alex!”

You do not see 200. You wonder if he’s in the bathroom getting off. 

“Is—did y’all really do what people said?” Alex says, looking at the ground, snow collecting in his hair like tiny flowers. 

“Alex,” his mother calls again from the door. 

You see his father’s face underneath you—lamplit, breathless, alone. Your own face looking back at him. 

A voice lies out of you. “No, I made it all up.” 

Alex nods and wipes his eyes. He totters like a much younger child back toward McDonald’s and his mother collects him at the door. You don’t want to move. You’re not really there. You are null. You are in a theater watching a movie about snow.  

You are sitting in your car and forgot how you got there. It’s 10:57, but that means nothing. The snow in your hair melts and trickles down your face. You defrost the windows and red brake lights blink nervously down the unplowed roads. His truck is gone.

You open Grindr, where you met, and the app says he’s seven miles away. He only deleted it for a month after one of his pavers caught you fucking in the backseat of his truck. 

You scroll through your old messages—mostly nudes—to prove to yourself that it was real, making stops along the way. 

I’m goin’ to Arby’s first want anything? was his last full sentence. More nudes. Your breasts are pink-nosed fish. 

Let me see how hard

Good girl

Did you shave today?

Show face

Your phone dies and the same face appears in the darkened reflection you now hold in your hands. It stares at you for a long time, then looks away at the chirp of a passing bird. It’s not snowing anymore. The tops of the trees glisten with sunlight. The branches hanging over your car knock around lightly in the wind. The storm is breaking up, drifting down the valley, and there is a future in that.