Cody Brennan

You are standing in Trevor Wojcik's kitchen with his thumb on the cold edge of the counter. The machine-shop calluses on his palm catch against the laminate. His belly sits soft over the waistband of his sweatpants. The refrigerator hums, and every house on his street is asleep.

You have worn him for less than a minute, and already he is wrong. His shoulders are too high up, the ceiling is too near, and his body is built to carry loads you will never lift. You wanted something that moved differently. That is all, and you would not say it aloud even in an empty kitchen. You open the site on his phone, and the wheel turns under his thumb.

Then there is a mattress under your chest and your face is pressed into a pillow that smells of sweat and cheap detergent. Your breath is ragged, then it is even, because you make it even. A streetlight leaks through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet in a thin hard stripe. One arm hangs off the bed, and the blood has pooled in the fingers so they feel thick and far away.

You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back. Your hands fold on your chest, and you have not decided that.

The shirt is thin cotton, worn soft, and it gives you the first thing. A sleeve pulled over a forearm in a dark trailer, before the sun, a sunburn under the cloth from the day before. He dressed quietly so he would not wake her. The sagebrush smell came in under the door. Two small shoes sat by the step, and he set them straight with his toe without knowing he did it.

The sheet is under your fingers. The blanket at your feet is gritty with fine desert dust that no washing ever gets out. Touch it and it is his daughter, sitting on this mattress at a different hour, braiding the end of his beard with fingers too small for it. He is laughing, and the dimples are cut deep. He is behind on the lot rent, and the debt sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. The trailer is worth less than he owes. He knows it every morning and has told no one.

His fingers move on their own. The thumbnail goes to the cuticle of the first finger and picks. It is raw there, and he has done it all his life when he is afraid.

There is a woman's name that is not the mother of the children, and a church parking lot, and a prayer said badly at the edge of a bed. There is a big night once a month, a loud one, and the flat gray morning after it. There is a long beard he grew because it made the work-site boys stop asking him things. Your legs ache from kneeling on lawns. Your back has the good tiredness of a day spent hauling mowers up a trailer ramp, and your shoulders feel strong.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. The knuckles are thick and cracked, the nails are packed with dirt that never leaves, and the cuticles are torn. You turn them over slowly. They are warm and they are yours.

You look up, toward the dark ceiling and past it, and your voice comes out in a lower register than you expected, with his dryness in it.

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."