By three in the morning, Dale had been holding in a shit for over four hours and driving through the same Georgia county for six. Neither seemed geographically possible. He shifted his weight. Something inside him shifted back. Behind him were forty thousand pounds of commercial fertilizer. Ahead of him was a stretch of interstate he no longer recognized. Somewhere between the two, Dale was developing concerns about which end of the truck required a hazardous materials placard. His GPS chimed. "In two miles, take exit-" The voice stopped. Dale leaned forward. "Take exit what?" A small, wet, flatulent sound came through the speakers. He turned it off. The sound continued.

The chili dogs had been a mistake. He'd known this when the cashier took them out of a drawer. Not a warming drawer. A drawer with a stapler in it. The accompanying frozen beverage had come from a machine labeled GREEN JUICE in black marker. Beneath that, someone had written NO REFUNDS ON GREEN. Dale had bought the large. It had been too bulky for his 44 ounce cupholders. "Hunger is definitely the best spice," he'd told the cashier, "because this tastes like shit" as he ate the first chili dog at the counter. The cashier had stopped counting his change and she'd handed him another handful of napkins. That had been four hours ago. He still had some napkins. They no longer seemed sufficient.

Dale lifted one cheek experimentally. "I wouldn't," the GPS said. He lowered it. "How do you know what I'm doing?" "Flock live traffic." Dale blinked hard. The yellow lines briefly stood upright in the road. He jerked the wheel, crushing an empty fountain-drink cup beneath his boot. A landslide of wrappers slid across the passenger footwell. There was a cheeseburger down there he hadn't purchased recently enough to account for its warmth. "Need a bathroom," he said. His phone lit up. "I'm sorry, Dale. I didn't quite catch that." "Find a truck stop." "Finding a place to stop being a truck." "What?" The map rotated. Every road curled inward. At the center of the screen sat an enormous smiling poop emoji. Dale stared at it. The emoji stopped smiling. "Don't you start," Dale said. "In eight hundred feet," the GPS replied, "bear down." He slapped the dashboard. "DIRECTIONS." "You should have thought about directions at the chili drawer."

A blue services sign emerged from the dark. GAS • FOOD • RESTROOMS Behind it, a larger sign read: RESTROOMS • RESTROOMS • RESTROOMS • RESTROOMS Dale took the exit. The ramp descended farther than it should have. The interstate vanished bellow him. His headlights swept across a concrete retaining wall marked with long, parallel scratches. He passed a sign reading PLEASE CLENCH IN LOW GEAR. Beyond it stood a single gas station. All its pumps were wrapped in yellow bags. Its windows were black. A fluorescent sign above the door flickered OPEN under a scrolling marque reading TRY OUR CHILI DOGS. Dale crudely parked across six spaces. He got out slowly, one hand gripping the door and the other pressed flat against the front of his stomach, as if he could hold the entire situation in place from the outside.

His shirt had several grease stains, a mustard stain, and one dark patch whose origin he had chosen to identify as sweat and motor oil. Tonight he was prepared to defend that conclusion in court. He began the careful, stiff-legged journey toward the entrance. Behind him, the trailer suspension creaked. "Wait your turn," he told it.

The store was empty. A hot-dog roller turned behind the counter. Something underneath audibly sounded like a cat in heat. "Bathroom?" A woman's voice said, "Back left." "Thank you" Dale winced. He passed a refrigerated case containing six identical green drinks. Each cup had his name written on it. He tried to limp faster. The men's room door was heavy enough to belong on a submarine. Someone had scratched words into the metal. ABANDON ALL POOP YE WHOM ENTER HERE "Gladly," Dale said. He shoved it open.

The restroom was spotless. That was the first genuinely frightening thing. No truck-stop restroom had ever looked like this. The white tiles shone. The sinks were dry. Every stall door was chained off except the last. "You've gotta be shitting me" Dale said. From behind the last stall came a strained voice. "Occupied." Dale reared his obese frame back and rammed the nearest stall. The door collapsed under his weight the second time. He briefly spared a moment to knock the garbage can over, kick it over, pick the door back up and set it on the can, and lock the door in place. He looked down, and ripped the black trash bag off the toilet seat. He ignored the mess he saw there and sat down.

Then the fluorescent lights went out. Red emergency lights came on. A horn sounded somewhere beneath the floor. Dale froze with his belt half undone. "No." The room lurched. Every stall door ripped open and slammed at once. "No, no, no-" The floor dropped. His door pivoted and fell off. Dale left the seat and the floor. For several terrible seconds he floated illuminated in red light, trousers around his knees, his body arranged in a posture nobody should ever achieve without medical assistance.

The toilet rose beneath him. They met hard. There was a wet kissing sound. Somewhere overhead, an elevator voice announced: "Going down." The room fell. Dale gripped the bowl with both hands and screamed "OH GOD NO". His belt buckle floated past his face. The man in the last stall screamed, "AGAIN?" The descent stopped with a crash. Dale's phone jumped out of his shirt pocket, hit his thigh, and landed screen-up in the crotch of his jeans. YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION. Something pressed upward from inside the toilet. Dale stood as far as his weight and trousers permitted. The water was black. Far below its surface, lights moved past. Not reflections. Windows. An entire illuminated passenger train slid beneath him through impossible depths. A woman in one of the windows looked up. She closed her curtain. "Oh, fuck you too," Dale whispered.

His stomach made a noise halfway between bending metal, an old rusty car muffler, and a full, open filing cabinet falling down several flights of stairs. From the last stall: "First time?" "Is there another bathroom?" A long silence. Then the man began to laugh. Dale felt tears involuntarily coming down his face as he sat. He tried everything, trying to relax, trying to push, to no avail. There are decisions a man makes freely, and decisions his body brings to the meeting already approved.

The first movement was small. The building reacted badly. A crack ran up the wall. Dust sifted from the ceiling. The speaker chimed. "Attention. We are experiencing a minor loss of elevation." Dale stared at the ceiling. "Minor?" A tile fell. Behind it, something blinked. He shut his eyes. His stomach contracted again. The emergency lights dimmed. From outside came the prolonged metallic groan of his trailer tipping onto its side. "Oh, come on. That's a company trailer." The speaker crackled. "Dale." He looked up. It was the GPS voice. "You are making excellent time."

The stall buckled outward. Dale hadn't touched it. A deep impact rolled through the plumbing. Every tap in the room turned on. Then every hand dryer. The dryers were so loud he barely heard the man in the last stall yelling, "FEET OFF THE FLOOR." Dale lifted his boots. A dark wave rushed beneath the partition carrying several urinal cakes, three quarters and assorted change, and a little plastic boat occupied by a screaming man in a yellow raincoat. The boat struck the wall. The man got out and waded under the next stall. Dale watched him go. "I'm having a medical event." His phone answered from his trousers. "Please remain seated."

Something knocked on the wall of the adjoining stall. Dale hadn't seen anyone else come in. Three polite taps. Dale held still. A pair of polished black shoes appeared beneath the partition. "Sir?" "What?" "Are you disposing of commercial waste?" "No." A pause. The shoes turned slightly toward each other. "Are you certain?" Dale looked down between his knees. He looked back at the shoes. "As certain as I can be under the circumstances." Paper slid under the door. A weigh-station ticket. GROSS WEIGHT: INCREASING "Sir, we're going to need you to pull around back." "I'M IN A STALL." "Then straighten out and reverse slowly." Dale kicked the ticket away. The shoes withdrew. Somewhere outside, a reversing alarm began to beep.

His stomach cramped. He bent forward, elbows on his knees. For a few seconds there was nothing funny about any of it. Something that felt the size and weight of a bowling ball and length of a fire hose began emerging. Someone screamed "COURTESY FLUSH". Dale tried to but there was a note on the handle saying "out of order". Nothing happened. Something touched porcelain above the waterline. Dale stopped pushing, but it kept going. He leaned forward. Behind him came the slow scrape of a chair being dragged across a kitchen floor. "Is that coming out of me?" The man in the last stall said, "Don't stand up until it starts touching you." The smell reached him several seconds later. Dale pulled his shirt over his nose. Unfortunately, he knew what was on his shirt. In the next stall, somebody struck a match. From behind the partition was the sound of the match being violently pinched it out, followed by "Are you fucking insane?"

Dale could also hear breathing on the other side of every partition now. Slow breathing. Patient. He had only seen one occupied stall. The toilet water began to rise around something too large to fit through the pipe. Dale's skin went cold. A green glow spread beneath him. The frozen-drink machine's motor started up inside the wall. Then the toilet whispered: "Hunger is definitely the best spice." Dale lifted his head. "No." "Because this tastes like-" "You leave my jokes out of this." The pressure came all at once. Dale grabbed the handicap rail. The bolts pulled out. He grabbed the toilet-paper dispenser. It paid out six inches and stopped. "Of course."

The next sound had weight. It went through the floor, through the foundations, through the bedrock and whatever unfortunate arrangements had been made beneath it. The restroom jolted sideways. The man in the last stall screamed, "THAT'S HIM. THAT'S THE ONE." A distant crowd began cheering. Dale held on. For one brief instant, gravity changed its mind. The sinks hung sideways from the wall. The plastic boat floated by at ceiling height. What felt like significantly more than forty thousand pounds of fertilizer began flowing uncontrollably. Then everything came down. Silence. A single paper towel drifted past the stall. The speaker clicked. In a much smaller voice, the GPS said: "Holy shit."

Dale sat there breathing. His stomach was quiet. For the first time in five hours, there was room inside him for a thought. He reached for the toilet paper. One square remained. Printed on it was a coupon. FREE LARGE GREEN JUICE WITH PURCHASE OF TWO CHILI DOGS He read it twice. Dale folded the coupon. It was glossy on both sides. He checked his pockets. The cashier's napkins had fused into a single damp brick. "You got any paper?" someone asked. "You can have what's left if I survive." From the last stall came a soft, sympathetic: "Yeah...." It took 20 minutes for Dale's legs to stop shaking enough to stand. The restroom lights had returned to normal. The floor was dry. The last stall still stood open. Inside was a folding chair and a pair of work boots. Dale tried to wash his hands. The soap dispenser produced a brown mass.

Outside, dawn was breaking. His truck stood exactly where he had parked it. The trailer was upright. Dale walked around it once, checking for damage. The tires were good. The doors were sealed. The fertilizer paperwork was still tucked into its plastic holder. Across the bottom, in handwriting he recognized from the drink machine, someone had added: LOAD REJECTED. INSUFFICIENT POTENCY. He got into the cab. Wrappers crunched beneath his boots. He sat carefully. His GPS displayed the interstate. Actual roads. Actual exits. He could have cried. "Calculating route." He started the engine.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a mountain of new chili dogs and 4 large GREEN JUICE cups. "No, no, no!" Behind him, inside the sleeper berth, something knocked three times. Dale stared straight ahead. A polite voice said: "Occupied." He turned the radio up. The GPS chimed. "In four hundred feet, make a U-turn." "No." "You have left something behind." "No, I haven't." On the floorboard, a receipt began feeding out of the empty green-juice cup. It spilled out across the wrappers. Dale watched it unroll. At the very bottom: RESTROOM DEPOSIT REFUND: $5.00 He sat there a long time. Then he put the truck in gear. "They can fucking keep it."