Anil Deshpande

Wendell's gold tooth keeps finding the inside of my lip. Forty-three years of a tongue doing it, and in less than a minute I've caught it at it six times. I'm standing in his kitchen in Eastern Kentucky with his coffee going cold in his right hand, the late-morning light flat on the linoleum, and I am bored of him in a way I can't put a name to. Then I can.

He has a bad left knee, and I found that out going down his porch steps. I found out he laughs like a screen door. I found out that when his phone buzzed, something in his chest went toward it before I'd even read the name. That was the thing. He has someone. The body wanted to answer, and I didn't know how to make it want that for me. I stood there with his thumb over the glass while the wanting came up in him like water in a basement, and none of it was mine. I was the wrong tenant in a warm house.

So I put the mug down. The page is already open. The wheel is already turning, and I let it.

Grass. The ground is soft under me and cold comes up through the soles of my shoes. A lawn full of people, every face tipped up, and I am tipped up with them, paper frames across my eyes. The light is the color of old film. Then the dark comes down and the whole lawn makes one noise, and I am inside it, a mouth open mid-cheer that has nothing behind it yet.

I pull the glasses off. The cardboard has gone soft where his fingers held it, and the moment I touch it something opens.

The arm of a chair in a kitchen, and a girl of eight holding up a paper plate with a hole poked in it. Pinhole, Baba, look, look. His pride is huge and quiet and it sits right under the ribs. He taught her this from a library book and he never said so.

The jacket is heavy on my shoulders, canvas gone soft at the cuffs. I put my hand in the pocket and find a folded receipt and half a roll of mints, and the morning comes up through the fabric. His wife's voice from the other room: Take the dark one, it'll be cold on the grass. He zipped it to the throat and then, because she was watching, unzipped it two inches. Sleeve by sleeve. The left arm first, always, because of his shoulder. Then the sweater, which she bought, which itches at the neck, which he'll never say.

My thumb goes to my mouth before I tell it to. Teeth find the edge of the nail and take it down, quick and practiced, and with it comes years of this: the tight months, the envelopes with the windows, the bills laid out on the table at night. A drink or two to soften them. A cigarette he gave up and still reaches for in his sleep. The gold band turns on my finger, loose with the cold, and I know it was her mother's idea to buy it plain.

My belly is soft and my back aches in a place that's been aching for a decade. My knees are fine. My lungs are better than they have any right to be. Around me, strangers are laughing and crying and holding up phones, and he knew a few of them by name. A congregation in a pale building, folding chairs, a woman speaking about wonder without once saying God. He liked that. He liked not being told.

The black sun hangs there with its ring of white fire. I hold my hands out in front of me, the wrong color, the right weight, nails bitten to the quick. I turn them over. The ring catches the strange light.

I lift my eyes and say, to nobody, "Oh. It's been so long since I've seen anyone's hands shake like this."

How long will this one hold? The wanting is already in him, faint, a tide somewhere out past the lawn.