Brian Keith Osterhout

Warren Talbot's kitchen is dark except for the stove light, and I am standing in it with his thumb on the phone, the screen glowing the page with the wheel. The skinny-fat belly presses the counter edge. His knees ache the way sixty-three-year-old knees do when they have stood too long. I have been him for less than a minute and already I know what's wrong with him: nothing. He is fine. Houston is humming with the first trucks. Coffee maker ticking. The shaved head cool under my palm, the stubble rasping.

Nothing sent me back but this: he has a life that fits, and I could feel it fitting. A wife's slippers by the door. I want to be someone it does not fit yet. I press the button. I do not say the reason, even here.

The wheel clicks and slows.

Then the lamp is hot against my left cheek and my mouth is open on the last word of a sentence, and the word goes out of me into the dark room, a wish, half spoken, and I close my lips on the rest of it. The folding chair creaks under me. In front of me on the card table lies a dried paw, curled, brown as old leather, and one finger I did not decide to move draws in, then another. My shoulders drop out of their hunch. I am shorter than I was a moment ago, lower to the table, the carpet under the sneakers thin and gritty.

The flannel is soft with washing, and the sleeve against my forearm gives me the morning: his thumbs working the buttons wrong and starting over, the blazer hanging on the door for a showing at ten, his wife saying the blue shirt, not that one, and him saying nothing, loving her for it. Not the flannel then, a different day; the flannel is for nights like this, when he cannot sleep. His fingers find the ring on his left hand and turn it, round and round, worn smooth. The ring gives me a church basement, folding chairs like this one, a pastor's hand on his shoulder, three small children asleep across the back pew, and a number he does not say aloud. The house is worth less than the loan. A hundred thousand under, and he sells other people's houses with a lockbox in his hand and a smile that shows no arithmetic.

The jeans, stiff at the knee. The beard under my thumb, trimmed Sunday, short against the jaw. The mole on my cheek warm from the lamp. His body is small, compact, tight in the chest with something old, tired, but the hands are quick and sure. They know the paw already. They know the weight of keys, of signs, of a child's head. A flash: a gravel yard, saguaros black against a white afternoon, him on a porch waiting for buyers who never came, praying under his breath, ashamed to be bargaining. Tonight he bargained with a dead thing instead. He wanted one phone call, one buyer, one yes. The wanting is still warm in the chair.

I turn the paw over in the lamplight like a tool I know. I look at his hand, the ring, the pale band of skin under it. Then I raise his eyes to you.

"Well," I say, in his small dry voice. "That was quick."

And somewhere behind it the question is already humming, the way it hums every time: how long, before I want more than this.