Calvin Choi

You are Dale Pruitt for less than a minute more, and already you hate the lazy eye. It drifts when you're tired, and you're tired in a way a body can't fix. The welding mask hangs on its nail. Your beard smells like flux and cold coffee. The kitchen is gray before the sun, a Thursday, and the truck outside is ticking as it cools. You did everything this man could do in the first hour. Then you stood at the sink and understood that he was only ever a door, and that you had walked through him and stood in the next room, and it was the same room. So you open the phone. The wheel is already there, patient and ugly. You press.

Dark. Your cheek is warm with blue light. The phone is six inches from your face, and your thumb has stopped on something. You were inside a different breath a heartbeat ago, and this one is lighter, higher in the chest. Your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than whatever was driving it before. Posts go by. You do not blink when he would.

The sheets are cotton gone soft from washing, and they are under your forearm. A flash comes with them: the laundromat on a Sunday, folding in the heat, and a flat, quiet pride that he owns two sets and rotates them. The shirt on you is thin at the elbows. Under it comes a year of worry, a ledger with red in it, a roll of quarters for the register drawer. The pillow smells of his hair. Under the pillow his house key lies bent from a bad copy, and his thumb knows exactly where that key is without his mind asking.

The glass on the nightstand catches the lamp. You reach for it, and the hand knows the distance. A flash: the shop at opening, the roll-up door shrieking up its track, and the smell of cut keys and machine oil. The apron strings knotted twice behind his back, the way his mother taught him with shoelaces. Last winter he slept here with the heater clicking, a dead father's order book on his knee. The numbers wouldn't close. He is twenty-four. His knees are good and his back is good, but his shoulders hold a tight stack of nobody-to-ask. Calluses along the fingers, from threading pipe and hauling bags of concrete mix. The thin beard itches. He has been waiting for it to fill in and it hasn't, and he touches it when he's anxious. You feel that shame, small and constant.

The bun presses the pillow. You push the phone down against the sheet and the light drops off your face.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The palm is rough, the fingers are shorter than the ones you had an hour ago, and they are warm and obedient. Then you look up, toward the dark where the window glows.

"Okay," you say, quietly, in a voice that isn't yours. "Hello, Calvin."

The key is under the pillow, and the store opens in a few hours. You wonder how long he'll hold, and how soon the wanting comes back for you.