It didn’t look like early Easter Sunday at the gas station. It isn’t all Jesus and Easter baskets. All holidays are drinking holidays. The family congregates, observes, and gets stupid. At night the twenty-four hour convenience store transforms from a bustling hub of commerce into an outpost for the fellow third-shifters and the dregs of society. As the sole clerk manning the registers it was my solemn duty to observe these perishers and parishioners. Any childhood wonderment I once held for the sacred day shied away clinging to the very vestiges of my soul.

Continued in Dark Days on the Dixie Highway: Diary of a Third Shift Zombie