Cody Brandon Hatchett

You are standing in a kitchen in Seattle, in the dark before the day, and Martin Soto Greer's moustache is itching under your thumb. You have worn him for less than a minute. His coffee maker is clicking. His phone is lit on the counter with a standup reminder, and the sentence on it is already a wall you cannot climb. You are not tired of him. You are tired of the sentence. Nineteen times now, and still you pick the phone up and put the wheel on it, because a man who cannot be handed a different morning is not worth the moustache. You press the button. You do not hear the coffee maker finish.

Light, cold on the window. A chair under a patient's weight. Your right hand is out over a tray, mid-reach, and it has done something wrong: the mirror has gone against the steel with a small bright tick. You set it down. You pick it up again, slowly, correctly. Then ten more motions, each one checked, a man double-counting a sum he has done ten thousand times.

The scrub top is cotton gone soft at the collar, and the collar rubs one place on your neck. It gives you a morning: a hand pulling this over a head in a dim house, the snaps along the shoulder done one at a time, a feeling of being behind on money that he carries like a swallowed stone. The loan is a number with too many zeros. He prays over it in the truck. The black pants are loose at the cuffs, and the boots are heavy, steel-toed, bought for a farm he did not stay on.

The mirror handle is warm from your palm. A flash: a boy in a chair, a dentist with a kind slow voice, and the decision made at nine years old, without any money in it. The faint sweet clove smell of the room opens another door: a cigarette behind a church, nineteen, shame like heat, and the day he quit. Your right leg is bouncing. It will not stop. It has never stopped, not in exams, not at his mother's table. Through the window the barbed wire holds the frost and a water tower stands small on the flat horizon, and the gravel road he drives each day is white with it.

The body is wide and heavy and carries its weight low in the hips. His lower back aches the way a back does after years of leaning over mouths. His forearms are strong. His fingers know the tray without you.

You lift your hand. Freckled, thick across the knuckles, steady. You turn it over and look up past the lamp, into the glass, into whoever is watching.

"Nobody's going to be hurt," you say. "I'm only... borrowing the careful."

Your leg keeps bouncing. How long you get to keep it, you do not know.