Caleb Marsh

Dwayne Kilgore's left eye is glass, and at five in the morning in Atlanta I am standing in his kitchen with the socket aching. He has been mine for less than a minute. The foreman's hands are around a mug I haven't tasted. The goatee itches. The eye doesn't track right when I turn my head, so the world arrives in a delayed half-frame, and I understand that I will never learn to read depth through him. It is not a tragedy. It is only a thing he could not do, and I find I cannot stand it. I put the mug down hard enough that coffee jumps. The site is already open on his phone, the wheel waiting.

I press it.

The ground is gone and then it is back, and I am mid-stride. My left foot is already coming down, the weight going through it, and I stumble. It never lands. The running resumes on the other foot, arms lower, head still. Cold wet air goes into my chest and comes out white. A canal runs gray beside the path, and gravel crunches under black shoes. A watch on my wrist buzzes with a split it has no record of me ever holding.

Then the memories start, because everything touches me. The jacket's zip-pull taps my sternum on every stride, and with it comes the morning: him in a dark bedroom, the zipper going up in his fingers, a chill on his neck. He doesn't want to run. He runs because Tuesdays with no interview are the ones that go bad if he stays in. The sweatpants cling at the thighs, and I get a kitchen table and a laptop full of listings, the same four he has already read twice. The earbud presses in my ear, and a playlist he made for a girl surfaces. She left him two summers ago and he still keeps her number. His faith sits in me like a stone in a shoe. A Kingdom Hall. A tie that was too tight. Knocking on doors at fifteen and being embarrassed, then not being embarrassed. The nose ring is cold against my nostril. Somewhere under the lungs I find twenty-some thousand dollars he has refused to touch, and with it a fear he has never said aloud: that he is waiting for his life to start.

His legs are good. Twenty-four, thin, and sound, the calves burning cleanly, the breath deep and easy. Nothing hurts. I almost resent how nothing hurts.

I slow to a walk. The air tastes of mud and cold metal. I raise my right hand, the knuckles pink from the chill, and turn it over. The fingers are slender and the palm is damp. They are not the foreman's. They are nobody's but mine now.

I look up, and I say, "Huh. Hello, Caleb."

The canal says nothing. The watch buzzes again. I wonder how long this one will last.