Cody Brandvold

You are standing in a kitchen in Dallas, in a man of sixty-three, and the coffee is not made yet. His knees complain on the linoleum. His moustache is damp from the first sip of something he did not finish. Last night, at the front of a room of teenagers, he lost the word for a thing he had taught for thirty years. It was a small word. Nobody noticed. He stood there with chalk on his fingers and the room waited, and you understood that this was a body that would keep doing this. It would take its words one at a time. You have the phone in his heavy hand. The wheel is already on the screen, patient as a doorbell.

You pay. You spin. Nothing is asked of you.

Now a shovel handle is in your palms and the weight of the blade is out ahead of you, loaded, and you are mid-lift. Your back knows the arc. Your hips are already turning to throw the dirt, and you are not the one turning them. You throw it wrong, short, and it spills on your own boot. You stop. You do it again slowly: dig, lift, turn, release. Then ten more, each one checked, because your body has no idea you are checking.

The air is yellow and heavy. Out past the cut stubble a thunderhead is stacking black, and the wind carries the smell of wet dust before the rain. The mini excavator ticks beside you, cooling. There is a toothpick in your mouth, soft at the end, and your teeth go on working it without asking you.

The handle is worn smooth where his hands always sit. A flash comes up through the wood, in his feeling and not yours: a Saturday, a borrowed truck, a woman laughing at him for singing the wrong words to the radio. Her name is gone but the ease isn't. It is the old ache of someone who was good to him and who he let go. It passes through your chest like a swallow of cold water.

The shirt is stiff on your back with dried sweat and dirt. The orange fabric pulls at your shoulders, and the reflective bands are rough where they have been washed too many times. It gives you the morning. He pulled it off a chair in the dark, smelling of detergent and yesterday. He stood in the kitchen eating cereal over the sink. He pulled the jeans up one leg at a time, and the knee of the left one was already worn through to white thread. He laced the boots tight, tugging each lace twice, the way his father did. He put the hard hat on last, settled it with two fingers, and drove out through the dark toward the dig.

The boots are heavy with clay. Your calves are tight and warm. Your shoulders are strong, ready for the next lift, and nothing in this body hurts the way the old one did. Your beard is thick against your collar. Your breath comes deep, easy, a young man's breath. Thunder rolls somewhere far off, and your arms keep working under you.

You let the shovel rest against the trench wall and look at your hands. They are broad and cracked at the knuckles, the calluses hard as saddle leather across the palms. You turn them over. Dirt sits in every line. They have done this ten thousand times, and they are yours now, and they don't know it.

You look up at the sky going black and say, to nobody, "All right. Let's see."

The toothpick snaps between your teeth. You wonder how long this one will last, and whether the wanting will come back by noon.