Brian Kessler

You are standing in a kitchen in New Orleans, in the dark, in a man who has been yours for less than a minute. The linoleum is cool and a little sticky under bare feet. The gap between your front teeth catches your tongue when you breathe in. His girlfriend's cat watches from the counter. Every house on the street is asleep, and you are the only thing awake in it, with the phone lit in your hand and the wheel already turning on the screen.

He works. His back is fine and his hands are fine. Something else sends you back. Twenty minutes ago you opened the refrigerator and found a note on it in his handwriting, in your handwriting now, and you could not read what it meant. It said *call Dee about Thursday*. There was no Dee in you. There was only the want, and it had not gone anywhere. You pay. You spin. The wheel slows, and there is a man in a glass office with the door propped open.

The paper is in your left hand and his thumb is already moving down the page. The room is humming. The carpet is firm and the fluorescent light is cold on your forearms. You are halfway through a motion your body has made ten thousand times, and you get it wrong, a small clumsy slip. You do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more times, each one checked, because you have never done this and every move has to be proven.

The polo is soft at the collar and damp under the arms from the long night. It gives you the morning first. He stood at the bedroom window with the shirt half on, and a woman said something from the bed about the trash. A child's drawing was magnet-pinned to the fridge, a house with too many windows. He ate standing up. He pulled the khakis from the hook behind the door, and the belt took the third hole as it always does. The boots by the stairs were stiff with last week's wet leaves. He laced them sitting on the bottom step, and the leather smell came up at you, along with the thought *get through the shift.*

Your right hand finds a ring in his pocket and turns it over, over, over, and a Sunday opens. Mass in a cold church with his daughter on his knee, her small fist around his finger. Beneath it is an older ache, a woman before the one he lives with, a porch, a fight he still replays in the shower. Nobody knows he does.

The badge on his belt swings against his thigh. It is a small weight, a name on a card, the name of a man who was here and is not. The knees are forty-three years old, the shoulders strong, the beard rough under your knuckle when you touch your jaw. Outside the glass, the public stairs run down between the dark backyards, wet leaves plastered on the concrete under one orange lamp. He climbed them every evening and counted them without meaning to. Forty-one.

You put the paper down. You look at your hands, his hands, broad and warm and steady, the ring turning between two fingers. You lift your eyes to the dark window, to the reflection of a stranger's face, and you say it quietly, to the glass:

"Well. Hello, Brian."

The wheel is still somewhere behind your eyes, patient. You do not know how long this lasts. You do not know when the wanting comes back.