Caleb Thomas Ledbetter

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Pittsburgh with a hand that is not a hand. The prosthetic holds a glass of tap water and you cannot feel how cold it is. You can only see the fingers close around it, and the glass sweat. It is the middle of the night, the house ticking, the furnace off. You have been Gary Wayne Pasternak for less than a minute, and already you know what he would have done with this hour. He would have sat here and let the ache in the stump settle. He would have called it quiet.

You don't want quiet. You wanted a man who could pick up a coin off a tile floor, and you got one who has to look at the coin first. Nothing is wrong with him. That is almost worse. He is simply a body that remembers a loss you didn't choose and can't use. His belly presses the counter edge. His knees complain on the way to the table, where the laptop is still open, the wheel still turning its slow lazy circle, waiting.

You set the glass down. You press the key.

Then you are lying on your side in the dark, and the world is a blue rectangle six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped on something, a photograph, a stranger's lunch, you don't know. The mattress holds your hip. The sheet is damp with summer; the air in the room is thick as a wet towel even with the fan turning somewhere. Your thumb starts again, faster than his ever did, and everything he had stopped on slides away under it.

The shirt is the first thing. It is soft and old against your shoulder and ribs, and it hands you a morning: a Friday, his, in a bathroom with a fogged mirror, his own pale-patched hand dragging the clipper over his scalp because he decided years ago to stop pretending about the hair. Then the black button-down, sleeve by sleeve, the cuffs fastened over the patches on his wrists, a habit more than shame. He does not hide the hands anymore. He does it because cuffs keep menus from sticking to him. The pen goes into the pocket. The keys clip to the belt loop, a heavy ring of them, walk-in cooler, office, back door, a key to a building that is not quite his and never will be.

The mattress gives you another: the host stand on a full Friday, forty minutes of wait, a woman who said, "Is there someone in charge," and him saying, "Yes, ma'am, I'm sorry, it's me," and smiling until his jaw hurt. He felt tired the way iron is tired. You feel it settle in the small of your back, in the soles of feet that have stood on tile for eleven hours a day.

The phone is warm in your hand. It gives you a number, not a figure but a feeling: the weight of rent, a card he doesn't look at, a savings account that is a rumor. He is scraping by, and he is good at it. Something sweet turns up under that, a Sunday, a cul-de-sac, a neighbor's sprinkler ticking, him asleep on a couch until four with the game on and nobody to need him. Nobody. The word is quiet in him too, but he chose none of it and minds none of it.

Your beard is rough under your lip, two inches of it, joined to the moustache. You rub your jaw and the skin there is pale, mapped, on one side of your face. The patches feel like nothing at all. Skin is skin.

You lift the hand into the blue light. Five fingers. You close them and they close. You turn it over, the palm clean, the back pale in continents, and feel every knuckle answer.

You look up, into whatever is looking back.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low and a little hoarse. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."