Andre Whitcomb

You are Brian Kowalski, and you have been Brian Kowalski for less than a minute, and already you are tired of the way he stands. The patrol-car seat has shaped his hips. His scalp is shaved smooth and the Denver morning air sits on it like a palm. You came back to the page with the wheel on it because you could not stop checking the radio on his shoulder. He listens for a voice that is never for him, and you are sick of waiting for it. That is all. You press the button.

Sidewalk. Midday. The leash handle sits in your right hand, a plastic loop worn smooth by someone else's grip, and the cord runs away into a hedge where something dark is snuffling in the leaves. You have stopped walking. The air is cold and wet and smells like rotting leaves. Your breath is slower than Brian's, and heavier in the belly. A dog looks up past the branches. Its ears go flat.

Your left thumb finds the ring on your finger and turns it. Nothing. Then the jacket collar rubs your neck, soft old canvas, and it opens.

A closet in the dark before school. He takes the jacket off the hook because it is the one with the pocket that holds the phone, and he puts his arm in the right sleeve first, always the right, then shrugs the left. Under it the gray shirt, washed so many times it has gone thin at the hem. He pulled it on in the bathroom with the fan running so he would not wake the girl. His daughter. Her name sits just behind his teeth and will not come, only the feeling of it, a warm weight, a small fist in his collar.

The leash handle. Plastic, a thumb button. He bought the retractable one against his wife's advice, and she said it would teach the dog to pull, and she was right, and he has never admitted it. The dog is Moses. The name arrives with a laugh in it, his daughter at four, solemn, announcing it.

Your left leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing since you arrived, heel up and down inside a heavy black shoe, and you let it. Under the bounce is a hallway: lockers slamming like gunfire, a hundred voices rising, and him in the middle of it with a lanyard and a ring of keys, saying a boy's name in a level voice, and the boy turning. He is good at that. The weight of being listened to sits in his chest like a coin.

The beard is a stranger's warmth against your fingers when you lift them to your jaw. The shoes pinch at the left little toe. The knees ache faintly, forty coming, and the belly sits soft over the belt. Everything in him is a little tired and entirely paid for.

The hedge rustles. Moses is still looking at you.

You wind the cord around your hand, twice. You look at the hand. It is broad, the knuckles dark, a plain gold band on the fourth finger. You turn it over. Then you lift your eyes and say, to the dog, to whoever is listening, "All right. Let's see where you take me."

The leash tugs. You have no idea how long this lasts.