Brandon Yoder

Gary Dunleavy's feet hurt in a way I have stopped noticing and started resenting. Twelve hours on a unit, and then the hour before dawn when I should have been asleep and was standing in his kitchen instead, in his socks, looking at the gold tooth in the dark glass of the microwave door. It works. The knees work, mostly. The patients like him. A woman on the fourth floor held his wrist last night and said you're a good one, honey, and I felt it land in a place that was not mine and not his either.

That is the trouble. He is fine. He is a good body, and I am bored of being a good body. Everything he does he does gently, and I wanted, for once, to be something that bounces. Fifty is a long way down a hallway. The page is open on his phone, the wheel painted and patient. I pay. I spin. The gold tooth catches the screen light, the last thing I see of him.

Then a tap is running and my mouth is full of mint and foam.

The brush stops mid-stroke. My arm is already lifted, wrist cocked, the bristles against a molar. The light over the mirror is hot on my forehead. Water hisses into the sink. I am standing up very straight, taller than I was a second ago, and my left leg is bouncing against the cabinet, a small steady knock, as if it has been doing this since before I got here.

I start brushing again, on the other side, slower, working the back teeth. The jaw is smooth under my tongue's edge. Someone shaved this morning, close.

The shirt comes first. Soft gray cotton, washed thin, loose at the neck. It touches my shoulder blades and I get a hallway, a dim one, and his hand sliding a hanger along a rail. He took this shirt because it was the one on top and he had a set at midnight, and he was thinking about her, Kayla, no, the one before Kayla, and a text he did not answer. It is a recent ache. I feel it in the chest, the specific tiredness of being eighteen and already having a person to miss.

The jeans are dark and heavy, and the denim drags at the thigh. The thigh is thick, a runner's or a lifter's, and I flex it and the muscle answers instantly. In my pocket is a small cool cylinder. A vape. My thumb knows it before I do, finds the button, and I get a flash of the back step of a venue, cold air, breath and vapor going up in the same cloud, and the bass coming through the brick like a second pulse. He is not nervous there. He is only nervous here, in this bathroom, in the quiet.

I spit. The porcelain is cool under my palm. I rinse, once, twice, and I cup the water to my mouth and taste iron from the old pipes. Under my fingers the faucet handle is loose, and it gives me a boy of maybe ten, in this room, being told by a man's voice through the door to hurry up, church at nine. Wooden pews, a clip-on tie, the smell of coffee in the basement after. He does not believe in much. He still stands when they stand.

The brush goes bristles-up into the cup. The water in the bottom of it is grey.

I lift my right arm and the sleeve slides back. Fine lines on the inside of the forearm, triangles inside triangles, black and precise. His thumb remembers pressing on it the night it healed, a girl's laughing voice saying it looks like a map to somewhere. I turn the hand over. The knuckles are broad, a little chapped. A thin silver stud sits cold in each earlobe when I turn my head, and in the mirror a heavy single brow draws down over brown eyes that are not afraid of me at all, because there is no one left in them to be.

I look up into the glass. My leg keeps knocking against the cabinet.

"Okay," I say. His voice is lower than I expected, and younger. "Okay, Brandon."

It could be an hour. It could be until the water finishes running. I turn the tap off and listen to how quiet the house is, waiting for the wanting.