Hobart
One of my favorite authors and good friend, Bud Smith, curated excerpts of Honk in Hobart. For this I’m extremely grateful:
HONK
By Jason Sebastian Russo
ONE
Honk if in the winter of ‘96 you were released from 28-day rehab to live in your parents’ laundry room. Honk if the only job you could find in the small town you grew up in was turtle cleaner. Literally a turtle cleaner. As in, a local vet collected exotic turtles and he needed someone to syphon the turtle-shit-infused water with a pool pump attached to a garden hose. There were over 3,000 turtles in approximately 500 tanks. The smallest turtle was the size of a quarter, the largest was a snapper the size of a dining room table. The latter was kept in a pool covered in chicken wire. You and the goth kid, Dale, the only other employee, would toss full-sized trout into the gap in the wire. It was also your duty to carry the corpses of dead dogs to the giant refrigerator behind the garage. Sometimes you had to prop the door open with a frozen lap dog, a poodle or chihuahua.