Andre Kimbrough

You are standing in a hallway in Phoenix, in the dark, in Arjun Mehra's body, and the body is fine. It is twenty-two years old and it never once complains. That is part of the trouble. The janitor's keys are on the hook by the door. His mop-sore shoulders do not ache. Everyone in the apartment is asleep, and you have been him for less than a minute, and you cannot stand how little there is to push against. Nothing in him resists you, and nothing in him wants anything you could take. The cleft chin, the patchy beard under your thumb: you have worn it, and you are bored of it. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are on your face in a bed.

Your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone damp and warm. One arm hangs off the mattress, the blood drained from it, the fingers heavy as wet rope. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your shoulder. Your breath goes in ragged, snagging, and then in one pull it comes out even. You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back. Your hands fold at your chest, and you did not choose that.

The shirt is the first thing. Long sleeves, cotton gone soft and stiff with old dirt, still on him. Under your fingertips, a cuff, and then a morning comes up, in his feeling and not yours. A kitchen, five-something, dark outside. The smallest of his children is asking for the cereal with the bear on it. His wife is saying his name low, Andre, and handing him a thermos without looking, because she is looking at the stove. He buttons this shirt wrong, one hole off, and fixes it standing in the hall by the coats, his big thumbs patient. He is warm with something. It is not happiness exactly. It is being needed by everyone at once.

Your hands move on their own. The right one finds the left, and the knuckles crack, one, two, three, a small pop that is not yours. It loosens something. It comes with a lawn: dew, the sweet green smell of cut grass, a mower's handle humming up through both wrists, and the weight of earmuffs around his neck. A trailer sits at the curb, and a woman in a window watches him not stop.

Your ring finger meets the band. Plain, thin, slightly loose on a hand that swells with work. It opens a church, hard pew, a hymn he knows by his spine, his wife's shoulder against his. It opens something older too, a girl before her, a porch light, a letter he never answered. It hurts in a place that has nothing to do with you.

The smell of the room is liquor, faint, sour and sweet in the sheets. You taste last night in the back of his throat. The knowledge comes up the same way: a bottle in the truck, the way he says it is only to sleep. His mouth tongues the gap in his front teeth, a habit, a comfort. He is thirty-six. His back has opinions, low and tight, and his knees remember every kneeling. He is five-six and made of use. There is almost nothing in the bank, and somehow he is rich in people.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Thick fingers, a scar of callus at each palm's base, the ring.

You sit up and look at the dark, then at the door. "Okay," you say, in a voice that is low and hoarse. "Okay, Andre." Somewhere a child turns over in sleep. How long, you wonder. You flex the fingers. They close.