Casey Lindqvist

You are Brian Stoltzfus, and you are standing at a kitchen counter in Ohio before the sun is up, and his coffee has gone cold in a mug with a company logo. You have worn him for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. Everything works. The network is up, the blinds are open, the goatee is where it belongs. And you are bored down to the floor of him, a man who wants nothing, whose wanting you cannot find. You set the mug down. The page is already open, the wheel already waiting, and you tell yourself you only want to see it turn.

It turns. Brian's kitchen goes out like a pulled plug.

Then weight. Your face is pressed into a pillow, and your breath is ragged and hot against the cotton. One arm hangs off the mattress, heavy as wet rope. A strip of streetlight lies through a gap in the curtains. Your breathing evens out in one breath, and the arm draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at your chest, a posture he has never once slept in. He does not know. He never will.

The sheets are damp where he sweated. The T-shirt twists under your ribs, and the cotton gives you something unasked: a Saturday, a laundromat, his wife laughing as she holds it up and says it has shrunk, that he has shrunk, that nothing in his life fits except her. His laugh comes up through your chest, a feeling that is his and not yours.

The ring is on the left hand, warm, a little tight at the knuckle. You turn it with your thumb, and a hotel lobby opens: the lanyard bumping his sternum, a client late, thirty minutes to fill. His right hand reached into a pocket and found a lighter, and flipped it, flipped it. He quit four years ago. He kept the lighter. The thumb knows the motion, and your fingers twitch for it against the sheet. In his feeling it is a small private shame, and a comfort.

Under your back the mattress dips where it always dips on his side. A phone is dark against the pillow. Your stomach is soft and warm, a belly he has been meaning to do something about since thirty, and your shoulders ache from carrying a laptop bag through airports. Somewhere in the house the old tin roof ticks as it cools. You smell salt and mildew and the sweet rot of a tree in the red yard, and a memory of the morning he bought this house climbs up: the glare off the dirt, his wife barefoot on the porch boards, saying we could fix the roof, and him saying why would we.

There is a wedding in it too, and a quiet night after, and a year of good commissions. In your ears is the hum of a house asleep, and his wife breathing, perhaps, down the hall.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. They are broad and a little freckled, and they are not yours. You turn them over, once, and the ring catches the stripe of light.

You say, in a voice that is lower than you expected, "Okay. Hello, Casey."

The room holds. Nothing in you says how long. Already, faint as a draft under a door, the wanting stirs.