Andrew Kowalczyk

The first thing I notice, in the body I am about to stop being, is the knee. Osvaldo Benítez, sixty-two, five foot four, and the left knee has been telling me about the stairs since I walked up them this morning. I have been him for less than a minute, and I am already tired of his weather. I am standing at a window in a kitchen that smells of someone else's coffee. My thumb rubs the gray moustache because his thumb does that. A man in the street below is walking a dog, and the walking looks easy, and I want to be a man whose knees do not announce themselves.

That is some of it. The rest I keep folded. There was a drawer I opened and a name on an envelope, and I closed the drawer. A man who has just been given a life should not already be carrying one of his own.

So I go back to the page with the wheel on it. I pay. It turns.

Mid-loop. The hold music reaches its first bar again and the phone slides off my shoulder into my hand, and my other hand has a pen on an envelope, stopped on the second digit of a reference number. The counter edge is against my hip. Everything is taller. The floor is farther away and my shoulders are wide and loaded, and my breath is deep and slow, a big engine idling. Something small and sweet and chemical is going in my mouth. Gum. I am chewing gum, and I did not start.

The shirt is the first thing that speaks. Cotton, soft from washing, snug across the shoulders and tight at the sleeves, because a man built like this buys a size up for the chest and gets the sleeves too snug anyway. It comes back in his feeling: this morning, dark in the bedroom, the shirt pulled over his head while a woman slept, her breathing steady behind him. He stood a second with one arm in. Then jeans, stiff at the knee, the belt notch worn pale. He tied his boots on the edge of the bed. He was thinking about a bad inspection report and not about her, and he felt guilty for it, the way a man does who is only half in the room.

The pen is warm. The envelope is a county notice with a reference number, and holding the pen brings a flash of a porch in drizzle, a lockbox in his palm, the little brass click of the code. He has done that click a thousand times. His fingers know the rhythm. Then a child's voice, the middle one, asking if houses get lonely when nobody lives in them. He said yes, because it was true. The feeling comes with it, big and warm and slightly afraid.

The ring on my hand is cool metal. It lifts something older under the new: a different woman, years back, a rental in the rain, his key still on her ring after she left. He never asked for it back. I do not know why. He does not either.

The body underneath is honest. The thighs are dense, the back is strong, and a dull ache sits low on the right side from lifting a kid onto a shoulder, which is a good ache. I have no knee here. I stand on both feet and nothing complains. The jaw works the gum without asking me, steady as a pulse, and I let it.

The hold music loops again, bright and dumb. I put the phone down on the counter and look at my hands. Broad, dry at the knuckles, calluses where the pen sits. I turn one over. It is mine now, and the ring is the only part I am borrowing.

I look up at nothing, at white cabinets and the morning, and I say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."