Anil Deshmukh

You are Cody Brennan, and Cody Brennan's hands are cold.

It is the middle of the night in the high desert. The house ticks as it cools, and the dog is asleep against the door. You stand at the sink in the dark with a glass of water you haven't drunk. The beard is damp where you wiped your mouth. Cody has been yours for one minute. You have felt his dimples and his shoulders and the clean ache in his forearms from a week of shovel work, and none of it has been enough. Twenty-six, strong, easy in his skin, and you stood here feeling like a man trying on a coat in a shop. Some wanting in you did not get fed. You will not say what it was, not even to the dark window.

The phone is on the counter. The page is already open, the wheel painted in its patient colors. You pay. You spin. You watch it slow.

Then the dark is a different dark. It is soft, and it smells of laundry and a lamp that has been on too long. You are on your side, and your right thumb has just stopped on a glass screen six inches from your face. The blue light sits warm on one cheek. Your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than his ever did, flicking past whatever he stopped on. You don't read any of it.

Then the bed gives you its memories. The cotton of the T-shirt, thin from washing, is against your ribs, and the shirt gives you a morning: his hands pulling it on over damp skin after a shower, the left sleeve first, because his left shoulder is the stiff one. He thought of nothing. He was only tired, and quietly glad for the quiet house. Under you the sheet is cool. His wife's side of the bed is rumpled and empty, and a sadness comes up through the mattress that is his and not yours. There is a ring on your left hand, and when your thumb brushes it you feel a different night: a church hallway, a borrowed suit, and her laughing at him because he was shaking. A second flash comes close behind it, an older woman's voice on a phone, the ex-wife, careful and civil. He still carries that, folded small, like a receipt he can't throw away.

The pillow smells of someone's hair, and you get a lab. White light, the hum of filtered air, a satellite sitting on its stand like a sleeping animal. His hands know how to hold a torque wrench so gently it is almost a prayer. He is proud of that, and he has never said so aloud. Two children sleep somewhere down the hall, and you feel the weight of that in his chest like a stone he is happy to carry. You feel the muscle in his thighs, the heavy calm of his arms, a mild thirst. One eye drifts outward when he is tired. You can feel it wandering now, and the room is slightly doubled at its edges.

You set the phone face-down on the sheet and the light goes out of your cheek. You lift your hand and turn it over. It is brown and square-fingered, with a plain gold band, and it is warm and steady. Your breath comes slow and unfamiliar in the dark.

You look up and say, to the room, to nobody, in a voice a half-step lower than the last one: "Well. Hello."

The house is quiet, and you don't know yet how long this one lasts.