Callum Reid Maddox

You are on a couch, or a chair, or nowhere in particular. It is nearly midnight on a Friday, and the evening has been nothing: the scrolling, the same three tabs, a thread about waking up in a stranger's life that you have read before and read again. You have loved this since before you can say. The films, the stories, the two a.m. confessions of people who swear it happened to them. None of it was ever for sale. Tonight a page with a wheel on it is for sale. You do not believe it. You pay anyway. You spin.

It is the middle of the day where he is. Sodium light was in the facts, but this is gray daylight on a wet sidewalk, and you are in him already.

The pen is in your right hand, mid-stroke. The letters you were making go wrong, and you correct them slowly, as if you were the one who knew how. Then you check the next, and the next. Ten times you check a thing that has never needed checking. Cold comes up through the folding chair and the metal of the table edge presses your forearm. Coffee smell, wet brick, a bus breathing somewhere.

The sleeve of the corduroy jacket is under your wrist, and it gives you a morning: his hands pushing through the cuffs of the gray sweater, the loose threads, the hole at the hem he keeps meaning to mend. A girlfriend's voice from the other room, saying he looks like a lumberjack who lost a bet. He laughed, and the dimples came up, and you feel them now, deep in the cheeks, set in place at rest.

The notebook page under your palm is soft with erasure. Crossed-out lines. You catch a whole year in the paper: the night he wrote a sentence he loved and could not use, and another night in a bar, three drinks in, a cigarette lit on the sidewalk because he only smokes when he drinks. A woman from before, an old girlfriend, still the one he writes toward without naming. Nobody knows that. You know it now. It sits in his chest like a stone he is fond of.

The body is good. Broad through the shoulders, heavy in the thighs, a strength that wants lifting something. His knuckles are rough, the calluses are real, and the beard rests on his chest, warm. Somewhere in the hip an old ache. Hair at the collar, damp from the air. His boots are heavy and wet. He has almost no money, and the poverty is in everything he wears, and he does not mind it.

You lift your right hand off the page. You turn it over. The pen leaves a gray smudge at the side of the finger. You look up at the street.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Okay. Hello."

The wheel is already in the back of you, patient. How long is this one? Until the wanting comes back, which could be years, or by the time the coffee cools.