Brian Vukovich

Marcus Denby's office smells like liniment and old carpet, and his knees ache the way a fifty-year knee should ache after a lifetime of mats. You have had him less than a minute and already you know the ache is not going anywhere, that this body has a hip he babies and a whistle on a lanyard he touches like a rosary bead, out of habit, not belief. You spun for him last night wanting something steady, a man with weight to him, and you got him, and it took forty seconds behind his eyes to remember why steady bores you. There is a form on the desk — roster changes, some kid transferring out — and Marcus would care about that kid. You do not want to care about a kid. You want the wheel again, the drop in your stomach before it stops, more than you want anything Marcus Denby has ever built. So you go to the little laptop on the desk, the one with the site already bookmarked, and you spin it not for a reason you would say out loud, only because the wanting came back, the way it always does, faster now than it used to.

The bathroom tile is cold and the water is running and there is a toothbrush in your mouth, foam gone thin and cool on your lip, and the stroke you were mid-way through simply continues, on the other side now, slower, working the back molars like the man who owns this mouth has done every day of his life. You did not choose the pace. It is already his.

You rinse. Twice. You stand the brush bristles-up in the cup, out of water that has sat gray in that cup for longer than a toothbrush should sit in anything, and your hand does it without asking you, the way a hand does a thing it has done ten thousand mornings.

The waistband of the sweatpants is soft and worn at the drawstring, and touching it gives you a Tuesday — Brian pulling them on in the dark so as not to wake her, the shift starting at eleven at night and the sun already down by the time he leaves, home again with the sky pale and empty like it is now, noon looking like dusk to a body that sleeps against the grain of the day. That is why he is brushing his teeth at an hour when the street outside is full of moving trucks and mail carriers: he is going to bed, not waking up, and somewhere under this there is a fatigue that is not yours, old and structural, the kind that lives in the shoulders.

The ring is the loudest thing. It is plain, narrow, a little too tight now than it was, and it comes with her name arriving sideways, not given, just there — Dana — and a kitchen with a radio on and her laughing at something he said that wasn't even funny, and a version of himself that felt, in that kitchen, like the only good idea he'd ever had. There's a girl too, small, three maybe, a car seat buckle he fights with every morning before shift, a specific curse word he's trained himself not to say in front of her and says anyway sometimes. And under that, folded away where he keeps it, a name that isn't Dana's — Colleen — nothing recent, nothing he'd act on, just a shape at the edge of things, the road not taken, still warm the way old choices stay warm even when you'd never walk back down them.

His shoulders carry the weight of pipe wrenches and the particular strain of working under sinks, knees on tile, neck bent wrong for hours; his forearms are corded from it, and there's a callus at the base of each thumb that throbs faintly, contentedly, the ache of a body that is good at its work and knows it. His hands want to go to his mouth — you feel the pull, the small automatic hunger to bite at a nail's edge — and there is embarrassment folded into that want, an old habit he's tried to quit since Dana first pointed it out.

He never drinks, never smoked, prays to nothing, and there's a kind of clean, plain honesty in that absence, like a room with nothing hidden in it. Whatever he's worth, it isn't much, and he doesn't carry that like a wound either. Just a man. Ordinary in every direction you look.

You look down. The hands are broad, nicked at two knuckles, a thumbnail bitten shorter than the others.

"Whoever's in there," you say to the mirror, to nobody, to him, "you're not gonna feel this."

You don't know yet how long that will be true.