Caleb Vandermeer

You are Glenn Hayashi's hands on a kitchen counter in a dark Ohio house, and you have been him for five minutes. The refrigerator hums. His wife's slippers sit by the door, and upstairs a floorboard ticks as the house cools. The ledgers are in the next room, all of them balanced. That was the trouble. You opened the first column and found it already added up, found a man who is good at being finished, and the dimples in the dark window looked like someone else's idea of cheer. Nothing is wrong with him. You want out of him the way you want out of a coat that fits. You open the site. The wheel turns, and you let go.

Light, white and total, and then a kitchen. Radiator ticking. A phone is in your hands, warm, and your thumb hangs over glass that has gone dark. Your arm lowers on its own. Linoleum under the boots, cold coming up through the soles. A smell of turpentine, old coffee, and something sweet and burnt, pipe tobacco, in the fabric of everything.

The hoodie comes first. Its cuffs are frayed where his thumbs go through them, and the thumbs go through them now. A flash: this morning, the zipper stuck, and his wife's voice from the other room saying leave it, leave it, you'll rip it, and him laughing and ripping it a little anyway. The warmth of that is not yours. It sits in your chest like a swallowed coal.

The gray shirt under it, stiff at the hem with dried paint. You press the cloth and it opens: a bedroom on the third floor, eggshell white, cutting in the ceiling line with a brush held like a pen, a steadiness he has never once been praised for. Your wrist knows the small flick that lifts the bristles clean. The jeans are heavy with dust. Kneeling in them, always kneeling, and the knees ache in memory, a dull bruised hum.

The wedding band turns under your right thumb, loose, a little warm. A kitchen very like this one, a small girl on his shoulders, her fists in his bun, and a hymn he hums without hearing himself, wrong in the third line. Faith here is a habit like breathing, quiet and unembarrassed. The pipe is in the hoodie pocket. You find it, the cherrywood smooth as a river stone, and a whole winter stoop comes up, wet street, sodium light, smoke he lets out slowly because the beer is gone now and this is what is left to hold. Under that, small and private, a woman from years ago whose name he never says, and the money he keeps in an account nobody mentions, a careful, ashamed, tender pile.

The body: narrow shoulders, soft belly under the shirt, a tiredness in the lower back like a hand pressed there. Freckles you cannot see but feel as a kind of weather on the nose. Beard thin against the knuckle, and the bun tugging at the scalp.

You lift your right hand into the light of the hanging lamp. Paint in the creases. The ring. You turn it over, and it is steady, a worker's hand.

You look up at the black window, at a stranger's brown eyes in it, and you say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

Nobody answers. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, whether tomorrow's hands will be these.