Caleb Hostetler

Henry Takeda's left ear is the first thing I use up. Cauliflower, hard as a knuckle, ringing from the warehouse floor where the forklift beeps all shift. I press it against the cold glass of the breakroom window and look at Philadelphia in the middle of a Thursday morning, trucks backing in, a pallet jack somebody has left across the yellow line.

I have been him for less than a minute. His back already aches in the way I'd have to learn. His stubble itches. The phone in his big hand shows the page with the wheel on it, and I know why I'm here and I'm not going to say it. Something about the way the foreman said *good job, Henry*, kindly, as if to a man who would stay. I did not want to be someone people were kind to for staying.

I press the button. The wheel goes round.

The engine drops a note and catches.

Handlebar. Vibration up both forearms, the red grip warm under my palms, the whole machine shaking its small thunder into my wrists. Grass clippings stick wet to my shins. One earmuff has slid off my ear and the world pours in: a dog two yards over, a screen door, wind. Gray sky. I'm halfway down a lawn, and the rows behind me are crooked.

My feet know what to do before I do. Hips square, weight forward, push. The body is lighter than Henry's, and it's twenty-two, and it doesn't hurt anywhere. It feels like a drawn bowstring.

The shirt first. Gray cotton, thin at the collar, damp across the shoulder blades. It gives me a morning: a hook by his back door, he reaches for the gray one because the white shirt and tie are for the store and Thursday is his day off. He stood in the kitchen with a cup of coffee going cold, looking at the yard, not wanting to, wanting to. The store is his. Keys on his belt every day, the pallets in the aisle, the opening count. Twenty-two and they trust him with the keys, and he has never said he is proud of it.

The handlebar gives me his father's mower. It was his father's, and the pull cord frays at the handle. A summer, ten years old, being shown how to start it, a big hand over his small one. *Don't fight it. Let it catch.* The memory is warm and I feel it in my own chest, which is his chest.

Hair against my neck, shoulder-length, tucked behind the ears and now loose in the wind. The pocket of the work pants: a tin, the flat round shape of the nicotine pouches. A flash of the back steps behind the store at six in the morning, a pouch tucked under his lip, counting the day ahead. Quiet. A small town's quiet, one stoplight, the diner on Main closed since the spring. He drove past it and felt something he doesn't have a word for.

The boots are heavy with wet. Church last Sunday, the hard pew, hymn numbers on the board, his mother's voice a half step flat beside him. Twenty-some thousand saved in an account, the number he checks like a pulse. A girl he didn't call back. No one he's waiting on.

I let go of the bar with the mower still running. The dead-man bar kills it, and the silence is huge.

I look at my hands. Young, rough across the palms where the grip sits, green stains in the creases. They are not Henry's. They are not mine either, and I don't know what mine would be.

I look up at the gray sky, the fence, the dandelions gone to seed, and I say, "Straighter, then."

I put the earmuff back. I wonder how long this one lasts, when the wanting comes back, and whether I'll still be him tomorrow.