Flushboy

"My hat is off to Stephen Graham Jones, because he is the kind of author that makes the frustrated writer inside every book reviewer cringe with self-doubt."--PopMatters

So there's video footage of me not washing my hands in the bathroom at work. My dad says it's the kind of the thing that can tank his whole business. That he has to be extra careful. Don't I understand?

Usually when he's spewing all this, I just stand there.

Last week I was his show-and-tell for Sunday school class. We wore matching ties, and I was under strict orders not to smile or look sly. Some of those people were his customers, after all.

I don't know.

Anyway, bam, yeah, the camera caught me: I ran the water but didn't wash my hands.

Over the course of one shift working the window of his father's drive-through urinal, our sixteen-year-old Flushboy will have to not only juggle gallons of warm pee and deal with the worst flood ever (it's not water), but he'll also have to fend off the urine mafia, solve the citywide mystery of Chickenstein, and win his girlfriend back.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of ten novels, three collections, and one novella. He is a full professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in the low-residency program for University of California Riverside--Palm Desert. Stephen is forty-one, and married with children.