Aidan Corrigan

You are standing in a kitchen in Las Vegas in Hector Valdivia's socks, and the house is asleep around you. The refrigerator hums. His wife's breathing comes down the hall. The keys are on the hook where he put them in the dark, and for the first time since you got him you notice how much of him is keys. Keys, shifts, a counted-out hallway of men who do not look at him. You were in him for less than a minute before you knew. He is a good body, a strong one, and it wants nothing. It stands at the counter and waits to be told, and you have nothing to tell it. So you go to the screen that is already open, and the wheel is already turning, because what sent you back was not him. It was how quiet he is inside, with nothing in there to push against.

Then the quiet is gone, and a different one begins.

The couch takes your weight before you do. Your head is back, your mouth is open and dry, and a can is warm in your right hand, sweating a ring into the skin. A crowd roars from a television. You have missed something. You sit forward, and your thumb finds the volume on the remote without looking, steady, steadier than the beer in the can should allow. But there is no beer in you. The can is wet and the taste in your mouth is only sleep. You watch the ball on the replay, and not the score.

The hoodie is the first thing that speaks. Its cuffs are stiff with grit, the cotton gone slick at the wrist, and your thumb finds a hole in the left cuff. A morning comes up through it that is not yours: the alarm in the dark, the hood pulled over wet hair, and the coffee shop glow on the street, where he stood outside and did not go in because eight dollars is eight dollars. The cold stung his ears. He was tired in a way that had stopped feeling like tiredness and become a place he lived.

Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. Heel up, heel down, the whole thigh trembling, the couch springs answering. It has been doing this for years, in every waiting room and every cab. Your boots are by the door where they fell. You can smell them, rubber and cardboard and old rain, and your back remembers the trailer. Box after box, a wall built to the roof of it, the shoulder ache that settles in near hour six. It is a good ache and an honest one. Your hands know the weight of forty pounds before you lift it. A thing like pride lives in that, small and unspoken.

You rub your jaw. Stubble, three days of it, rasping. The lamp's yellow sits on the side of your face, and your cheek, high up, carries a small raised mole that your fingertip finds like a button. Someone used to kiss it. The memory comes up warm and goes bad at once: her laugh in this room, her feet in your lap, a jacket left on the hook for two weeks after, and then not. Her name sits at the edge of it. You do not reach for it. The coffee table is a mess of envelopes with windows in them, a photograph face up, and two coasters. He has been counting what he owes, in his head, at night.

The couch is a rough weave, worn smooth where his weight goes. You press your palm to the cushion and a hundred Sundays come up, a game, a laugh, a friend's elbow. You hold your breath at how plain it is. He was not unhappy. He was only waiting, and the wanting in him was small and fixed: a Tuesday off, a lease renewed, a call that might still come.

You lift your left hand. The forearm turns in the lamplight, and the lettering is there on the inside, a name and a date, black script gone soft at the edges. You do not read it yet. You know it is already hurting, somewhere in him, the way a pressed bruise does. You turn the hand over. The fingers are thick, scarred at the knuckle with nothing, only work. Then you look up at the dark window, where the game floats in the glass, and your own reflection sits in it with its mouth a little open.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected. "Okay. You're mine."

The replay ends. Somewhere the wheel is still there, patient as a light left on. You do not know whether this is an hour or a year, and your leg keeps bouncing.