Aidan Kowalczyk

You are standing in a kitchen in Miami at the hour when the building goes quiet, and Russell Tennant's knees are talking to you. They have been talking for forty minutes, since you came in off his balcony with his glass of ice and nothing in it. Sixty-five years old, skinny as a coat hanger, and the cleft in his chin has been catching the light of the microwave clock. You did not get to the top of the stairs this evening. You got to the fourth step and your breath ran out, and you stood there with your hand on a rail that was not yours while his heart did its slow old arithmetic. That is all. Nothing happened to him that does not happen to everyone, and you will not say it was fear, because you would not say it out loud. You put the glass in the sink. You open the page with the wheel on it.

It spins. You do not feel the number.

You are in the car. Dark road, a hum under your seat, and your hands are at ten and two with green light lying on the knuckles. The car has drifted a foot toward the line. You pull it back in one smooth stroke, and your hands let go and come down lower and wider, because you are not him and you hold a wheel differently. Your thumb finds the stalk and the signal ticks on for an exit that is not his. You do not know it is not his. He would know. He is not there to know.

Then the car gives him to you in pieces.

The wheel first: the leather is worn pale at the top left, and his thumb knows the spot. Flash: a lot behind a lecture hall, a different car, a cousin teaching him to merge, shouting happily, *you're not asking, you're telling them*. His feeling is embarrassment and gratitude, braided so tightly you can't pull them apart.

The sweatshirt is not on him tonight; there is a black t-shirt, thin at the collar, and the seatbelt lies across it. Touch brings the morning. He pulled it from the pile on a chair because the clean pile was the chair. Sleeve over one arm, then the other, the cotton cold against his ribs, a quick check in the dark window for the hair, pushing the fringe forward with two fingers until it sat right on his forehead. The goatee he trims with the kitchen scissors, which he is a little proud of. The hoop in his left ear he turned once with his fingertip, a habit, a small private click of luck.

The backpack leans against his hip. Its strap, rough and sun-bleached, opens a laptop's worth of weeks: a paper due, a group chat gone sour, a girl in his seminar whose name he practiced saying and never used. Straight, single, no one he is still angry at, no one who will call tonight. Money is not something he thinks about, which is its own kind of money. A drink on a Friday, once or twice a month, a big one, the next day a long grey headache. He never wanted a cigarette. Under the L tracks he rents a room where trains shake the dishes, and tonight's winter dark is already pressed against the glass.

And his body. Twenty-one. Small, five-three at most, and the pedals are close, his legs bent and quick. His shoulders are loose, his stomach full of cheap coffee, his back warm against the seat. There is no ache anywhere. You keep searching for the knee, the breath, the stair, and they are not there. His heart is a fast clean drum. Between your teeth is the ragged edge of a thumbnail, and you realize you've already lifted your hand to your mouth, his hand doing what it always does.

You take it away and look at it. Bitten short, pink at the edges, the knuckles lit green by the dash. You turn it over. It is a young man's hand and it is yours, for now.

You lift your eyes to the dark glass and the face in it, blue-eyed, bearded, not yours either.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is higher and lighter than the one you left. "Okay. Hello."

The signal keeps ticking. Three miles of road ahead, and no way to know whether you have three miles in him, or three hours, or three years.