Brendan Hoyer

Three minutes ago you were Kevin Lee, standing in an ambulance bay in Small-town Ohio, and the radio had just gone quiet after a call that ended the way calls end when they end badly — a kid, a bike, a driveway too much like the one you're about to stand in. You felt Kevin's chest do the thing it does, the tight climb of it, and you thought: not this. Not three minutes of this. Kevin is nineteen and good at his job and none of that is yours to fix, and you didn't spin the wheel to sit inside somebody's grief shift after shift. You spun it because the bay door was still open behind you and the night was going to keep asking things of this body that you didn't want to give. So you found the site on the cracked phone in his pocket, and paid, and span, already leaving before you landed.

The hedge is glossy and full of afternoon and the leash is a small blue weight in a hand that used to be Kevin's and is now, for no time at all, nobody's. The dog's ears go back. It looks up past the hedge — not at the hedge, at him, at the shape of him — the small animal certainty that something about the smell or the stillness has changed even though nothing above the shoulders has moved. The leash goes slack. The hand that was walking has stopped walking. Then it winds the reel twice, decisive, too decisive, and starts off at a stride the dog has to trot to match.

The shirt is the first thing. Grey, thin, a size that fought him a little at the shoulders when he pulled it over his head this morning — no, not this morning, an afternoon shirt, he keeps this one for after his run because it doesn't cling — and there it is, an hour that isn't yours: Brendan standing in the garage-room with the bay window throwing cold white light down at an angle that never once looks like morning, pulling this exact shirt off a hook by the door, already thinking about the dog's bladder and the reading he hasn't done and whether he has time for both. He does the reading on the lawn most days, laptop balanced on his knee, headphones in, the campus grass making a specific damp print on the seat of his jeans that he has stopped minding. He is twenty. He likes the smell of eucalyptus more than he'd admit to anyone. He is, in the ordinary unremarkable way that most people are most days, fine — a little tired, a little behind on a paper, nothing you'd point at.

The shorts against his legs bring back the gym, always the gym, the specific grind of a deadlift bar rolling up his shins, his build good for it, built for it almost, the fat and the muscle both doing real work, and how his therapist — a woman with a soft voice and a cluttered office three blocks from campus — once told him his body carries what his mind won't say out loud, and he'd laughed because it was true and because laughing was easier than the alternative. The medication is a small orange bottle on the bathroom shelf above the sink he shares with no one. He has never smoked. He has never wanted the taste of a drink badly enough to find out what it does to the tightness in his chest, because the tightness is already spoken for, already named, already managed in small blue pills and Tuesday afternoons.

The ink comes last, through the skin itself, the half sleeve tightening slightly as the arm swings with the leash: his grandfather's unit, inked at nineteen in a shop that smelled like antiseptic and cheap coffee, the old man's photograph still on Brendan's desk in a frame that doesn't match anything else in the room. He'd gone alone. He'd cried a little in the chair and told the artist it was the pain, and the artist, who had heard that before, said nothing and kept working.

There was a woman — Marisol, brief and enormous the way only sophomore year can be enormous — and she is in the hand too, in the particular way this hand once held a phone at three in the morning composing a text it never sent. She is the one who got away, and he still thinks, sometimes, on this exact sidewalk, about the version of this year where she didn't.

The dog pulls again. The body absorbs it easily, a small tug against a frame that has carried worse.

You look down at the hand holding the leash, wide-knuckled, a callus at the base of the thumb from a bar that isn't here, and turn it over once like it might explain something.

"Good boy," you say, to the dog, in a voice that isn't shaking yet, and you don't know if you mean it as apology or as cover, and you don't look ahead to find out.