Andre Whitfield

You are standing in Omar's boots at the kitchen counter of a house that is not his, and the whole barracks is asleep.

His body is twenty and strong, and it has been yours for under a minute. The thighs hum. There is a cold glass of tap water in your hand, and your thumb is working the rim the way his thumb did before you came. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He can lift, run, and sleep in any bed, and you feel like a man in a coat that fits and has no weight. You asked the wheel for something and it gave you a good body. What you wanted, you realize, was one that had somebody left in it to be stolen from, and nobody was left here. His beard itches. You set the glass down. The phone is already in your other hand, and the page with the wheel on it is already open. You pay. The wheel turns, and you let it.

Then the kitchen goes, and there is nothing in between.

You are on your stomach. The sheet is damp under your cheek and your breath is a ragged saw, and then, in one pull, it is smooth. Your left arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it. You drag it up. The body rolls itself onto its back and the hands fold on the chest, a way he has never once slept. Cold light comes through a gap in the curtains. The room smells of old smoke, a laundered pillow, and a body that was warm a second ago.

His memories come only through what you touch.

The T-shirt is thin and soft at the collar, and a morning opens. He is putting it on in the dark, with her asleep. He feels guilt at the floorboard that creaks, and tenderness he would never name. Sleeve, then sleeve. The sweatpants have a drawstring he knotted twice, because it fails otherwise. Your thumb finds the ring on the left hand and turns it, and the whole of a courthouse afternoon arrives. It was a cheap ring and a borrowed tie. She laughed so hard she cried, and he had never in his life been so afraid of happiness.

Your palm presses the mattress and finds the hollow where she sleeps. It is cool, and she is not here. Something like a shift, a double, her mother's, a reason. His chest knows it and hurts the way a tooth does.

Your fingertips brush your jaw. Stubble, and the cleft in the chin, which he has touched while thinking all his life. A lathe comes up through it. Steel chips curl around his boots, the coolant stinks, and the foreman stands at his shoulder saying *close enough is scrap*. He hated it for two years. Then one day a part came off the chuck exactly right, and he loved it and told no one.

Your lungs ache for a cigarette. A whole pack a day lives there, and the craving is a hand opening and closing. The body is twenty-three, bald, lean, sore at the shoulders from shifts, and quick and sure in the fingers. Under it all is the faint wreck of last weekend's drinking.

Streetlight lies across the blanket. You lift your hand into it and turn it over. The ring catches, and the knuckles are scarred with a hundred small burns.

You look up and say, to the dark, "Okay. Okay, you."

Somewhere under your ribs is the question of how long the wanting stays quiet.