It’s me again! Your friendly neighborhood self-insert! Bear with me for a moment while I elaborate on a few things. Romy Park and Zachary LeChance have known each other for eons. Ages. Oodles. Yonks. A very long time.

They met in a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot. One of the downtown ones, where it isn’t really a parking lot, it’s more so a damp, concrete place to store the dumpsters and go for a cigarette break. If you were lucky, you could fit your car down there without losing a rear-vision mirror. The KFC in question was a tiny one-room kiosk with red-and-white-tiled walls sticky with grease (the white was more like a yellow at this point, because soap isn’t something people afford downtown), and probably home to more rats than a sewer. The ceiling would drip when it rained, but what it dripped certainly wasn’t drinkable anymore. A window (which gave a stunning view of the dumpsters and a moldy slate wall) and one of the glass panes in the door had been smashed by a drug addict a few weeks past and probably weren’t going to get fixed. The deep fryer had never been cleaned.

A 14-year-old Romy Park was being paid 11 dollars an hour to sit behind the counter in a grubby, pre-owned red apron and browse her Instagram. She’d been told to do three things when she was hired, those being;

1) Throw anything that’s been sitting in the hotbox out after an hour. It’ll turn green (it still tastes the same, but we don’t want customers asking questions). You can eat it if you really want.

2) If a customer asks for anything other than an Original Recipe or a Zinger, charge them double. There’s a reason we don’t give out menus.

3) If a customer has a problem at all (e.g. hair in the food, cists in the meat, discolored lettuce), tell them to fuck off.

P.S. If one of those fellas with those patches on them comes in, scrunch up a wrapper and serve it to them. They can’t tell the difference between that and chicken, and no point in wasting ingredients.

Romy was currently scrunching up a few napkins and shoving them into a packet meant for fries. At one of the tables sat a mountain of a man, rolls and rolls of fat protruding from underneath his sweaty grey shirt, his eyes rolling about in their sockets and a thick curtain of drool running down his many chins. On his forehead, glue adhering to his sticky skin, was a white square, like a band-aid. They were sold as ‘Oriental Herbal Medicine; Helping You Reach Enlightenment, One Patch at a Time™’ but anyone with half a brain knew that if it didn’t have an ingredients list, it definitely was not what it said it was. Romy knew this too well, as someone who squeezes pink foam from a tube, deep-fries it and passes it off as chicken.

The man hadn’t said anything. None of them do. They just stand in front of the register, eyes flopping about like fish out of water, and make some sort of sound. Sometimes it’s a grunt, sometimes a groan, sometimes it’s more like a burp. On one memorable occasion, one of them had come in, positioned themselves in front of Romy, and did nothing. For hours. Romy waited, and waited, and waited, but he had never moved an inch. She’d locked up the restaurant and gone home with him still standing by the counter. She’d come back the next morning and he was still standing there.

He stood there for the better part of four days before an ambulance arrived and announced him dead.

She handed the current man his ‘Original Recipe Bucket, Fries and Potato and Gravy’, made entirely of wrappers and napkins and packets and assorted other non-edible things she could find lying around her station. The ‘Special Sauce’ had stumped her, so she emptied a packet of gravy into a tub and just spat in it. The man’s hand brushed hers as he reached for the tray; something stuck to Romy’s skin. Something yellow, and stringy, like slime but thicker, and with a smell like raw meat. She flinched and held back the urge to gag as she wiped it onto her apron.

The fat man stunk. She could only deal with so much stink in one day, and the restaurant itself handled enough of that. She glanced over to the hot box, the glass of which you could barely see through thanks to a Staphylococcus Aureus infestation on it and decided it was time to throw away the leftovers. She could see the ‘drumsticks’ greening on the very ends.

She emptied everything in the makeshift incubator into a garbage bag and escaped out the side door, into the parking lot. You’d expect the air inside a steamy, slimy fast food restaurant to be thicker and harder to breathe than the ‘fresh’ air outside. You’d expect wrong.

The dumpster hadn’t been emptied in weeks, and maggots traversed it like a desert. Flies hovered above in buzzing black hordes. Romy swatted them away from her eyes as they clung to her watery lashes. She hauled the black bag of artificial chicken waste over her shoulder, and just as she’d pegged her nose and pried open the grime-encrusted lid to the dumpster…

“Stop!”

She dropped the black plastic lid back onto the pile of bags and boxes and food scraps with a resounding damp thud. Beside her, a few meters away, sliding between the KFC wall and the door of a most-likely-illegally-parked car, was a boy. “Are you just gonna throw that away?”

He was thin, and dirty. He wore a baggy white singlet that hung loose over his bony shoulders, and it had something resembling a bloodstain on the front of it. His shorts threatened to fall off his hips. His black hair was getting long and knotted beyond repair, and there was a cut across the bridge of his nose that was starting to seep and fester.

“Yeah?” Romy said vaguely.

“Please don’t! Please…” The boy’s eyes were so incredibly blue Romy found herself transfixed. They were like oceans, or entire skies trapped inside his corneas.

This is how Romy and Zachary met. She would give him the greening leftovers, invite him inside the restaurant for soda. He would tell her his name, she would tell him hers. They’d make small-talk until the fat man left and Romy locked the KFC up for the night. She’d invite Zachary back to her house to stay, but he’d politely decline, and run away back into the night. He came back to the KFC the next day, and the day after, and the day after that.

Let me clarify one thing. This is not a love story. Romy doesn’t like men. She never will.

Eventually, Zachary stopped coming back as often. He got taller, gained some weight, bought some nicer clothes. Apparently he’d found a ‘benefactor’, whatever that meant, and didn’t need to devour Romy’s leftovers at such a frantic speed that he’d make himself dry retch. One day, he stopped coming altogether.

Romy quit.

He probably died. People did that a lot downtown.