Andre Pinkney

You are in the kitchen of a man named Gilberto Mendoza, and he has been yours for less than a minute. The light through the window is the gray of before-the-day, the coffee maker is ticking, and his belly presses the edge of the counter. The scar through his eyebrow itches. You touch it. Nothing comes back, because you have touched nothing of his that he loved. Something is wrong with him. He is short, and the cabinets are too high. He is heavy, and the stairs from the bedroom took something out of his knees you did not want to pay for. You wanted to be tall once, and you were, three bodies ago, and nobody has ever given you back the length of that stride. So you open the page. The wheel is already there, patient, a color you have stopped trying to name. You pay. Your thumb is his thumb, and you spin.

The sidewalk arrives under you mid-step, then stops. A hedge is in front of you, wet and green and smelling of cut leaves. There is cold on your scalp, where there should be hair. Your whole body has lengthened. The leash is in your right hand, and at the other end a gray dog is nosing the hedge. It lifts its head and looks past the greenery, up at you, with its ears laid flat.

You wind the leash twice around your fist. The plastic grip is warm.

Then the grip opens something. A kitchen, a different one, and a woman's voice saying his name, Dre, the leash is by the door, and a feeling of being easy in a small space, of being known there. The dog is hers first, and he pretended not to like it for a month. He talks to it in the truck. You did not know that, and now you do, and it is not yours.

The zip of the hoodie is cold against your chin. You pull it, and the morning comes with it: he stood at the foot of the bed in the dark, let her sleep, and pulled the black hoodie on over the gray shirt because the porch stairs in October bite. He cracked his knuckles on the way down, left hand then right, a habit he does not know he has. Your hands do it now before you tell them to. The pop runs up your wrists and it feels good, and the goodness is his.

The boots are heavy. Under them the concrete tells you he laid some of it, or somebody like him did. His calves know the weight of a nail gun, the hose coiled at his heel, a wall of studs going up on a fresh slab while the sun came up over the Mattapan side. Your thumb finds a shallow groove at the base of the left one, from a hammer handle, and the pride that comes with it is the pride of straight lines. There is a church too. A hard pew, a hand on his shoulder, a hymn pitched too high for him, which he sang anyway. Under his sleeve something sits on his calf, a face in black and gray, someone he lost or someone he carries. You do not look. It will not give itself up through cloth.

He has almost nothing. A truck payment. A girlfriend whose name sits in his chest warm as bread. An evening cigar on the porch rail on Fridays, a beer with the crew. A small life, tall and plain and finished well. And it is the first body in a long time that does not hurt to stand in.

The dog is still watching you.

You lift your hand and turn it over. It is long, the palm dark and creased and callused at the base of each finger, the knuckles still ringing from the crack. The leash cord is wrapped across it like a pulse.

You raise your eyes, and say it to the street, to the dog, to whoever is behind the glass:

"Alright. Let's see how far you walk."

You do not know how long this lasts. Somewhere under the breath there is a small hum already, the wheel, patient as ever. The dog takes one step toward you. You take one back, longer than it expected.