Each truck was only allowed to feature one menu item. Food trucks would line the four streets surrounding the square, and they’d have live music playing in the center. The festival would take place in the park. I glanced at the map I’d printed off the website. “Come on, let’s go check in and see if we can get some intel on the competition.” Lawson and I locked the truck and walked over to a huge tent the organizers had set up in the middle of a grassy square. “Not just ‘a shot,’ but a great shot.” I grabbed the registration paperwork I’d filled out. “You really think we’ve got a shot at this?” Lawson asked.

The festival would run for two days, including my favorite holiday of the year: National Footlong Day.

Battle of the Belts would be our first competition, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Thanks to a business loan, we’d bought an old bus and converted into a state-of-the-art commercial kitchen on wheels. We’d been operating a gourmet hot dog cart on a small scale for the past three years. Didn’t matter to me how many competitors showed up as long as Lawson and I walked away with the twenty-five-thousand dollar grand prize. This was the first year Sycamore Mountain was hosting their Battle of the Belts food truck competition. The website hadn’t been crystal clear on that. “How many trucks are competing?” My brother Lawson looked out the windshield at the crowded parking lot. No one back home in Broken Bend, Texas, thought the vintage vehicle would actually make the trip to Sycamore Mountain, North Carolina, but we’d covered the twelve hundred miles without a single incident. That’s how it’s done.” I pulled into the parking lot reserved for competitors and cut the engine on the school bus my brother and I recently renovated into our gourmet hot dog food truck.

Mustard Been You by Eve London