Caleb Dunnigan

You are standing in a kitchen in Houston with a glass of water you have not drunk. Adrian Villarreal's feet are cold on the tile. His belly sits soft over the waistband of his shorts, and his patchy beard itches under your thumb. Twenty years old and four minutes of him, and already the apartment is too full of what he left: a roommate's snoring through the wall, a textbook open on the counter to a diagram you can't read.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He works. He is warm. But you stood in his kitchen and felt the whole sleeping house around you, and the wanting came back as it always does, quietly, like a hand on the back of the neck. You have been nine hundred and ninety-five men. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, ticking over its pegs, and you do not decide so much as stop deciding not to.

The tile goes. The glass goes.

The mattress comes up under your chest. You are face-down, one arm hanging into cold air, and the breath in your mouth is ragged, then, in one pull, even. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your cheek. You drag the hanging arm up and roll onto your back, and your hands fold on your chest, a shape he has never once slept in. It is a corpse's posture. You did not choose it. The body simply arrived with you in it.

Then the room starts to hand him over, in pieces.

The sheet under your palm is rough, washed too many times, and with it comes a laundromat on a Sunday, quarters in a cup, the smell of dryer lint and his mother's old advice about hot water. The sleeve of the dark shirt he sleeps in is pilled at the cuff, and your thumb finds the pill and you feel him pick at it on a bus, bored, twenty-two, a week after the layoff before this job. The waistband of the grey pants has gone soft. You know without wanting to that he is behind on the truck, that the number he owes is larger than the truck is worth, and that he does the arithmetic at red lights and then stops.

Your calves ache. Not from today; from every day. The carpet fibers, when your heel drags, give you a trench at dawn, cold clay, the mini excavator ticking as it warms, and the spoil pile steaming a little in the light. The shovel handle is in your palms though no shovel is there: worn smooth where his right hand lives, and the calluses at the base of each finger know the weight and ask for it. There is a pride in it he would never say aloud, the straight wall of a trench, a clean bottom, a thing that stays dug.

Under the pillow your fingers touch a tin, and the nicotine pouches come back as a flavor, mint gone sweet, and the small guilty lift at ten in the morning when the foreman looks away. Then mountains behind the rooflines, a porch, a beer he nurses for an hour on the three nights a year he allows himself, and the feeling of being nobody's, of the whole evening belonging to him. He liked that. It surprises you how much.

The jaw under your hand is smooth. He shaved last night, though no one would see, because the hard hat sits better on a clean face. The hair falls dyed and flat across your forehead, black as paint, a decision he made in a bathroom with gloves on and has been quietly embarrassed about since.

Your chest rises. Slow, strong, twenty-three years of it.

You lift your hands off your chest and hold them in the streetlight. Square, scraped across the knuckles, clay in the creases that soap never reaches. You turn them over. Then you look up at the ceiling and say, to no one, in a voice that is lower than the last one:

"Okay. Hello, Caleb."

Somewhere under the rib there is already the small, familiar draft. You wonder how long this one will hold.