Anand Prescott

You are standing in a Philadelphia kitchen in a body that is thirty-nine and works, and the coffee has gone cold in your hand. The beard is gray and full and you have stopped noticing it. The knuckles are split from a boiler flange. The man has been yours for less than a minute and already you are looking past him, because the thing that sent you back is this: you stood at his window and the street was a street, and the wanting came up from the floor like damp. Nothing he did was wrong. The freckles on his forearms, the brown eyes in the dark glass, the tool belt on the hook. You could have kept him. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you let go of the cup.

The canal path, mid-stride, the left foot lifting. Your pace breaks for two steps, a stumble that never lands, and then the running resumes on the other foot. Your arms are lower now. Your head holds still. Your breath shows in front of your face, a small gray ghost, and then it is gone and you are the one breathing it. A watch buzzes on your wrist, a split it has no record of you ever holding.

Light, low and orange, behind the palms. The gravel gives under your shoes, and the grit comes up through the soles into the arches of feet that know this path.

The jacket first. Nylon, whispering at the elbows with each swing, cold at the collar. And the zipper pull against your chin: a morning in a dark bedroom, his hands finding the jacket on the chair so as not to wake her. The girlfriend turns over in the sheets and says his name without waking. He stands there holding his breath for her. You feel the tenderness of it, which is not yours, in your sternum.

The earbud in the right ear. A voice is reading something about markets, and with it comes the apartment balcony at mid-morning, coffee, a folded paper, a fortune that does not need minding anymore. He worked for it, thirty years of it, and then he stopped. Retirement sits in him like a held note he does not know how to end, which is why he runs: to give the days an edge.

The watch, pressing his wrist bone. Mile four. A pack a day, the lungs say, and you cough once, rough and wet, and the body goes on running anyway, athletic and stubborn at fifty-three. The ache sits in the left knee and the calves are strong. In the trouser pocket his fingers find a small smooth stone, and with it comes a woman on a stoop in another decade, an old girlfriend, laughing with her head back, and a door he closed himself and has never fully closed. And his mother's small brass lamp at the family shrine, the smell of ghee and marigolds, his hand lighting it on a morning he did not want to.

Your hands are in front of you, fists loosening. You turn them over. Palms creased and callused, a strange pale gold against the dawn. You lift your eyes to the water, then to the lens.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is deeper than you expected. "Let's see how long you last."