“We don’t have time for this!” Art shouted. “We’re almost home. Can’t you hold it?”
“Dad!” Reilly hollered back, his muscles tense, beads of cold sweat popping out on his pockmarked forehead. “It can’t wait!”
“Jesus Christ, we’re already a half hour late,” Art muttered, and swerved his old Subaru off the New Jersey Turnpike into an old rest area that’d been closed for as long as he could remember.
“If the door’s locked, you can shit outside around back,” he instructed, as Reilly bolted out of the car and waddled across the littered parking lot toward the men’s room. “Poor bastard’s not gonna make it,” he thought.
“Please don’t be locked, please don’t be locked, please d–” Reilly thought, clenching everything he had to avoid a humiliating disaster.
The door to the bathroom was not locked. Not anymore, at least. An old Master Lock lay in pieces on the chipped tile floor. There was no electricity; the only light coming in was from the clearly-unwashed skylights. The air, if what he was breathing could be considered such, was thick and fetid. Used.
None of that mattered. The nearest stall was open, and a grime-caked, waterless toilet, beckoned. He barged in, dropped his pants, and let go.
He sat, his elbows on his legs and his hands pressed against his eyes, until his body allowed him to move again. He sighed with relief and moved his hands, finally taking in the filth of the room around him.
It’d been a long time since anyone had cleaned the place, but not long since it’d been used. With a feeling of disgust, he glanced over to where the toilet paper should have been.
Then he saw it.
“What the fuck!” Reilly exclaimed, pulling the front of his shirt down and clamping his legs shut.
An eye was studying him from a jagged hole in the stall. Continue reading “A Questionable Glory Hole”