SB
Sean Beasley
Oct 30, 2025
There is an Arby’s in this town, you’ve driven past it, you’ve seen it, and you’ve wondered, and inside its walls exists a reality only loosely tethered to our own. I entered at 6:00 PM on a weekday, peak dinner hour by all known laws of mankind, and yet the dining room was a vast and echoing tundra of empty booths. The soda fountain hissed softly, as though whispering secrets to no one. A lone curly fry sat abandoned under a table, like a fossil from a forgotten civilization.
The staff greeted me with a warmth so immediate and sincere it felt rehearsed, like actors preparing for a play whose audience never arrives. Their smiles were just a fraction too wide, their politeness almost operatic. I half-expected someone to lean in and ask if I was finally here to awaken the others. Still, they handed me my roast beef sandwich with ritualistic reverence, as if bestowing a relic.
No music played. No fryer beeped. No other customer entered. I ate in silence, the ice machine buzzing like distant insects, every bite echoing in the hollow chamber of this meat cathedral. Outside, cars streamed past on the highway, but none turned in. None ever turn in. This place stands as a monument to mystery, a beef-scented Bermuda Triangle where diners vanish or perhaps are simply never permitted to exist in the first place.
And yet, the sandwich was good. Hauntingly good. Suspiciously good. As though in the absence of other patrons, all of reality’s remaining flavor was concentrated into this single meal.
Five stars? No. That would imply understanding.
Three stars: one for the meat, one for the curly fries, and one for the unsettling possibility that I was the only real person in that building.
I will return.
Not because I want to.
But because I must know.