Anthony Brandl

You are standing in a contractor's kitchen in Eastern Kentucky, before the day has started, and the body you are wearing is about to be abandoned. Brent Hollis has been yours for less than a minute. His boots are already on. His truck keys are cold in his fist, and his knee, the left one, announces itself on every shift of weight like a man clearing his throat. You don't want it. You wanted a man who could climb, and this one can't, and you found that out the way you find everything out, by trying it. A ladder, a rung, a body that said no. That is all. It is not a tragedy. You are already in the browser. The wheel is already turning, and Brent's thumb, which you are done with, presses the spin.

Then you are sitting down.

The chair is hard and the room is dim. A phone glows in your hand, and your thumb is dragging the glass. Watches slide past, steel and gold, and each has a price under it that is more than a year of something. The scroll stops. Your thumb lifts and stays lifted, hovering, and you let the phone go face-down on the counter. The glow dies. The kitchen is dark with a stone smell, damp and old, and cold coming up through the soles of your shoes.

Weight comes first. It sits on you, round and settled, the belly resting against the table edge, and you breathe into it and the breath goes down slowly. Thirty-two years old, and the knees are fine, the back is fine, the shoulders are strong in a dull way, built by shovels rather than by any gym.

Then the cloth. The sleeves are rolled to the elbow, and when your forearm brushes the table the wool under it gives you a morning: a dark corridor, the bell not yet rung, and these arms going into this sleeve one at a time, the left first, always the left, because that is how he does it. He pulls the hood-collar over his head and it catches on his beard, and he frees it with two fingers, a habit so old it has no thought in it. Then the belt. The leather is cracked and soft, and he threads it through the buckle and pulls it one notch tighter than comfort, as a small penance he has never told anyone about. A rosary hangs from it. When your fingers close on the beads you get the taste of an evening, a drink or two, the bottle kept behind the flour sacks, and the shame of it is slight and familiar, like a stone in a shoe. A pouch of nicotine sits under his lip, and you taste that too, sharp and mint-cold.

The fingers of your right hand are drumming on the wood. You didn't tell them to. They know a rhythm, and it comes with a memory: the garden, rows of beans, a stone wall holding the sun, and him on his knees at dawn with dirt packed under his nails, drumming on a hoe handle while he waited for something to be said to him. Nothing was. He stayed anyway. He loved that, or lacked the nerve to leave it, and from inside you can't tell which.

The phone lies dark under your hand. You remember it now, and it isn't your wanting, it is his: the watches, the clean hard shine of them, the small ache of a man with a vow of poverty who looks anyway. He has never told anyone. It is the most private thing about him, and you are holding it.

You lift your hand into the thin light. The palm is wide and callused along the base of the fingers, a spade's worth of work. You turn it over. The knuckles are scraped pale. You look up.

"Well," you say, and the voice is deeper than you expected, and kind, "let's see how long you last."

The cold keeps coming up through the floor, and the bell has not rung, and somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep, waiting.