Casey Lindqvist

Mason's shoulders are still warm from the register ledger, and I am still him. A bookkeeper's cramp sits in the right wrist. Under a lamp in a small Ohio office at the end of a Tuesday, I look at his dimples in the dark glass of the monitor and feel nothing. I had him for less than a minute. He could do everything I asked of him. The trouble is that he was easy, and easy has begun to taste like a held breath. Nothing happened to me while I wore him. That is the reason, and I don't say it aloud. I open the page and the wheel is already turning.

Light, white and total. Then a plate under my fingertips.

My fingers are halfway through laying something down. My thumb is wrong, a half-second late, and the garnish lands crooked. I lift it and set it again, slowly, the way you would do it if you had never done it. The window pours Phoenix in, gravel and two saguaros standing in the glare. The cold steel edge of the pass presses my hip. His left leg is bouncing, and I let it.

I place the next one and check it. I place the next and check it. Ten times, each one checked, on a thing his hands could do asleep.

Then the apron strings against my spine give me a morning. A small apartment, a tile floor cold under bare feet. He pulls the white jacket off a hook, and the cotton is stiff with old grease at the cuffs. He pushes one arm through, then the other, and buttons it crooked and leaves it. He is not thinking about me, or about anything. He is thinking about a woman's name, an old one, and a text he typed and deleted before the coffee finished. The ache is small and familiar, like a tooth he keeps touching with his tongue.

The jeans have a worn knee. A burn on the wrist, long healed, still remembered by the nerve. The black shoes are wet inside with sweat, and under them the floor mat gives like old bread. He is tired in the calves and good in the forearms. He is small, and the pass sits high on him, so his shoulders have learned to lift. He is proud of the speed of his knife. He has told no one how much he likes it when the tickets stack up and the whole room narrows to a line.

The lines of ink along my forearm itch in the heat, triangles inside triangles, and I remember the chair, the buzz, the quiet boy who drew them for free because they were friends.

I turn my hand over. It is steady. The mole sits high on a cheek I can feel but cannot see.

I look up and say, "Order up," and my voice is lighter than I expected.

Somewhere under it the wheel is already waiting to be asked how long this will last.