Bryce Kellerman

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Two minutes is nothing, and that is the problem with Douglas Farrelly. You are sitting on his own barstool in his own dive, on the customer side for once, and the beer he ordered out of habit is sweating a ring into the wood, untouched, because he doesn't drink and never did and you keep forgetting that in the first sixty seconds of anyone. Your hip aches already. His knees ache. There's a beauty mark on his jaw that isn't yours and never will be, and the bald head catches the neon sign backward in the mirror behind the bar, and you have had two minutes to sit inside fifty-three years of a man who complains, mildly, to no one, about his feet. Boredom isn't even the right word. It's more like impatience, the kind that comes from knowing there's a wheel three thumb-taps away and a whole line of other lives behind it, unspent. You pull out the phone. You spin it not because Douglas Farrelly is bad but because he is *known* already, fully, in two minutes flat, and that is somehow worse than bad. The wheel doesn't care what you're leaving. It only cares what it's about to hand you.

The light comes off the screen and then there isn't a screen.

There's a box of something in your hands, half out of a carton, half onto a shelf, and your arm — thinner than Douglas's, younger, sunburned at the forearm where the sleeve ends — sets it down crooked, wrong, the way a man sets something down when his mind has left the room for half a second. Then it corrects. Then it does it again, slow, deliberate, checking the label against the bin like this body has never done this job before, though something underneath knows better. Ten more boxes come off the truck pallet and onto the rack, and every single one gets checked, twice, on a job that hasn't needed checking in years. Nobody notices. The forklift beeps somewhere off to the left, out past the racking. Morning light stands in a hard rectangle at the open bay door, and past it, small and pale, a water tower holds up the sky.

The vest is snug under your arms, mesh gone stiff with old sweat, and touching the strap of it brings back a Tuesday — not this Tuesday, some other one — pulling it over his head in the break room, the smell of cardboard dust and the coffee machine's burnt smell, Danny from second shift saying something about the Rangers that didn't land because it was five in the morning and nothing lands at five in the morning. You feel that: the specific fatigue of a body that gets up when the sky is still deciding what to do, works while the rest of the county sleeps, and comes home to a trailer off a gravel road just as the school bus is starting its route. Nights. He works nights, most weeks, rotating through, and this Saturday happens to have him standing under warehouse lights at an hour that would read as morning to anybody sane, if the sun weren't already up on schedule outside without him.

The shirt against your back gives you the rest of it, sleeve by sleeve, because that's how it went on this morning — this same navy polo, wrinkled from the dryer, tugged down over his head standing in a bedroom with a water-stained ceiling tile he keeps meaning to mention to the landlord and never does. The name patch is somebody else's company, sewn crooked, and his thumb runs over the stitching without him deciding to, an old tic from clocking in a thousand mornings. Cargo pants next, stiff at the knee where a forklift clipped him once and he went down easy, no harm, just a bruise and a story he told twice and then stopped telling. Boots last, steel-toe, tongue folded wrong the way it's been folding wrong for eight months since the laces frayed and he keeps saying he'll replace them.

There's a girl he isn't dating anymore whose name comes up once, attached to nothing, a taste more than a memory — a bonfire out past the Farrell place, her laugh, a six months that ended without anybody being cruel about it. There's his mother's kitchen table and an argument about the truck payment. There's the specific quiet satisfaction of an aisle picked clean and correct, a route scanned end to end, no errors, the gun on his wrist chirping its small validating beep, and how much of his self-respect got quietly, permanently wired into that beep without him ever once saying so out loud. He doesn't smoke anymore, three weeks now, and his jaw aches sometimes from clenching around wanting one, a low current of want that never fully goes out. He doesn't drink, hasn't, made the choice himself and nobody made him. His knuckles crack without him telling them to, a rolling snap down the hand when he's thinking about anything else. Nineteen years old and the body already knows forty things it never had to learn on purpose — how to lift with the legs, how to read a bin code at a glance, how to stand for ten hours without hating your own feet, mostly.

You look down at the scanner cuffed to your wrist like it might answer for something. Then at the hand wearing it — broader through the knuckle than you expected, sun-browned at the wrist, pale above where the sleeve sits, a hand that has cracked its own knuckles ten thousand times without being told to and is not, right now, doing that, because you are new here and it hasn't occurred to you yet.

You turn it over once, like checking it for a label.

"Two minutes," you say, to the rack, to the water tower standing small and white through the bay door, to nobody, "was long enough."