Aakash Fernandes

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The plank walkway is warm already, though the sun is barely off the water. You feel that warmth arrive in his feet before you feel anything else — the wood, the give of it, the small sway that means the whole village is built on legs standing in the tide. His hand is still closed around nothing. The other hand withdrew so fast, and now it's just you, wearing him, mid-morning, mid-handshake, mid-life.

You know this walkway. You built the second house from the end, or you did in the years this body doesn't remember but you do, carrying lumber out here on your own shoulders before he was born, before his mother left for the city and didn't come back with more than a phone call twice a year. You know the boat tied below because you named it after her, badly, and he kept the name out of some stubbornness you recognize because it's yours.

He doesn't know you're here. That's the mercy and the theft of it both. He is going to work today the way he works every day — climb down to the boat, cross to the container terminal, stand under the gantry crane that looks, from this distance, like some patient insect deciding what to eat. He is going to do a longshoreman's day: chains, containers, the particular ache in the forearms that comes from holding steel steady while something enormous moves it. You feel that ache arrive around midday like a bell being rung inside the muscle, and it is the most honest thing you've felt in longer than you want to count.

You want to tell him things. That's the trouble with only having a day and having spent it as a passenger behind his own eyes — there's no mouth that's yours to move except the one he's already moving, laughing at the foreman's joke, calling out numbers to the crane operator, ordering fish soup at the stall by the checkpoint gate with money counted out of a pocket you didn't put there. You want to say: I am proud of the shoulders on you. I am proud you kept the boat's ugly name. I want to say sorry for the years I wasn't the hand you were reaching for.

Instead you just watch, folded somewhere behind his sternum, while he works. The studs in his ears catch light every time he tips his head back to watch the load rise. His hands, when they're not gloved, are your hands twenty years younger, though he'd never believe that if you told him, and you can't tell him anyway.

Evening comes back down the same way the morning came up, gold going long over the water, and he walks home along the plank walkway with his boots loud on the boards, and you feel every step of it as if it were the last thing you'd ever feel, because it might be.

At his door, before he goes in, he stops. Looks at his right hand. Flexes it once, like there's an ache in it he can't place, a phantom weight where a stranger's grip let go too slow.

You would have known that grip anywhere. You do know it. You held that hand first when it was small enough to fit inside one of yours entirely, on this same walkway, under a different, younger sun.

He shakes his head at nothing, goes inside, and somewhere past the threshold you feel yourself starting to let go of him the way water lets go of a hand pulled out of it — no mark left, no ripple that stays. Just the day, spent. Just the walk home, given back.