A Little Slice of the Moon Winner: The Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction Selected by Clancy Martin
Summer Hammond The McDonald’s Girl It is June 1995, and the clouds break. The sun pours into the Strafford, Missouri, truck stop McDonald’s, known to townsfolk as McStop. The sun makes luminous the fry station, turns the bubbling grease into glitter, magics to gold the fluffy ponytail poofing out from behind the blue mustard stained visor of the McDonald’s girl. Watch her. That smile she is smiling is solid, has weight, an anchor to keep her from lifting off, as she scrubs a splat of ketchup from the countertop. She scrubs and scrubs, though the stain is long gone. She is dreaming. She is floating. That sun! Her cash register wears a halo. There are some moments that are cathedrals. The dreamy nineteen-year-old McDonald’s girl, adorned in her blue Polo, black pants, nonslip restaurant shoes, mustard stained visor—she knows this. She knows, too, that she is, right now, inside one of those cathedral moments, and though she is standing, she is on her knees, praying the moment to stretch, out and out and out, so she never has to step outside its holy sweetness. The McDonald’s girl has just said yes. Barely. In a whisper. But she did it, she said yes. She has said yes when her whole life