Caleb Dunham

You are leaving Isaiah Toussaint because of the knife.

Two minutes in him, and you were standing at the prep station in Houston with the quarts of onions done and the walk-in humming behind you. Someone called for a brunoise, and his hands could not do it. You knew what it was. You could see it in your head. The fingers, though, were a stranger's fingers, and they bunched the blade and bruised the shallot. The cook beside you laughed, not unkindly. He said, "Thought you had that." You wiped your hands and said you'd be back in a minute. You went out to the dumpsters, where the heat sat on the pavement, and you opened the page with the wheel on it. Thirty-four years of somebody's patience were in those hands, and none of it was yours.

The wheel ticks. It stops.

You are standing, and it is dark, and the air is cold and smells of rain on concrete and fryer grease from somewhere far off. You are mid-motion. His hands are working through something at the edge of a folding table, under a lamp, without him watching them. One motion goes wrong. You feel it go wrong, a half second, a hitch in a rhythm older than you. You do it again slowly and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, on a task that has not needed checking in years. A laptop glows at your hip. The backpack drags both shoulders down. Across the empty street a red light holds over nobody, and a diner with a dead sign sits dark.

Then the cotton begins to speak.

The hoodie is soft and washed thin at the cuffs, and when your thumb slides along the sleeve it hands you a morning. A dorm-cold room, a Thursday, the gray sweatshirt pulled off the chair where it was thrown. His head goes through the neck. His left arm finds the sleeve first, always, because he is that kind of man. He tugs the hem down over his belt. The hoodie says MANCHESTER, a school he has never seen, bought secondhand because it was cheap and the fabric was thick. He felt, putting it on, a small private pride at looking like somewhere else.

You lift the left sleeve. The tattoo is under your thumb, ELIZA and a date in small black script. Nothing comes. Then something does, a smell like chlorine, a porch, and a grief he has stopped saying aloud. It goes through your chest and does not belong to you. You let go of it and your thumb is shaking.

The jeans hold the heat of his thighs. They are stiff at the knee, faded in the pockets from a phone he carries everywhere. They give you the bus, a long drive, a small town's one stoplight turning for no one. They give you his mother's voice on a bad line, saying come home when you can. The straps of the pack cut into muscle that is real, thick across the shoulders and back, built by something plain and daily, and carrying it up the library stairs is like breathing. The concrete under the sneakers is cold through the soles. Your jaw is smooth. You rub it and feel a clean razor's work from this afternoon. A little sting under the chin.

The fingertips are ragged. Your thumb goes to your mouth before you can stop it, and the nail is already bitten to the quick, and you realize this is a habit with its own memory. Every exam, every phone call he did not want to take. You are twenty-three. Your knees do not hurt. Your lungs fill all the way down. You have nothing to your name, and you can feel how little there is, the account nearly empty, the rent, the shift. And you can feel him wanting, small and stubborn, a degree and a way out.

He is not here. You listen for him, and there is only the cold and the lamp.

You turn your hands over. They are freckled on the back, square across the knuckle, steady now. You look up at the empty street and the dead diner and whatever is watching, and you say, in a voice that is lower and younger than you expected, "These are fast."

The light across the street changes from red and does not matter. You flex the fingers once and wonder how long they will stay yours, and whether tomorrow you will still be reaching for the hem of this sleeve.