Cody Hartwell

You are standing in Frank Moretti's kitchen in Rochester, in the afternoon, and you have been him for less than a minute. His coffee is going cold in a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE. Six foot three, and the cabinets are too low. You catch your knuckle on one and it doesn't hurt, which is the trouble. Everything in this body works. The knees, the shoulders, the broad, tired competence of a man who runs a press for a living. He is fine. You wanted something he could not give you, and you cannot say what it is. You put the phone on the counter, the wheel already open on it, and you press.

Then your weight is gone and a different weight is under you.

Your hands are on a box. Cardboard, a little damp with cold from the concrete, heavy at the corners. The pallet jack stands at your right hip. Light comes through the dock door, flat and white, and past it there is sage and a pale trailer on blocks. You were halfway through the motion and you are still halfway through it. Your hand slips, a wrong grab, a corner that doesn't want to come. You stop. You do it again slowly, and correctly.

Then you do ten more, each one checked, and your hands don't know why you're checking.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. It's thin blue cotton, soft at the cuffs, and the left sleeve is rolled twice and stays rolled. You feel his thumbs doing it in the dark of a bedroom, a girlfriend's lamp on, her voice from the bed saying you're going to be late, you're always early, and the small pleasure of that. The tie comes next, a clip-on. He hated the knot and she bought him the real one and he wears it anyway. The keys at his hip are cold brass and heavy. They swing against his leg and give you the back door of the store at six in the morning, a dozen winters of it, the lock that sticks, the particular word he says to it.

The radio on his belt is quiet. The cigarettes aren't on him, but the want is, a low hum behind the sternum, a pack a day, his lungs a little tight on the cold air. His stomach pushes at the belt. Dad bod, he'd say, and the voice that says it in the memory is his own, cheerful, unembarrassed.

You lift the next box and the sleeve of ink pulls across your forearm. Script, a name and a date. You don't read it yet. You feel it first: a chair, a needle's long burn along the inside of the arm, and him not flinching because he had decided not to. Someone he did it for. Not you. You are a stranger here and the arm knows it.

His hair slides forward. You tuck it behind your ear and the little silver hoop touches your knuckle. A dull ache in the eyebrow, an old white seam, a fall off a trailer step at nine, sagebrush, a bleeding that stained a whole towel. You laugh a little, his laugh, at the memory of being a child.

Under your boots, sealed concrete, and under that a whole dry valley of wind. You take your hand off the box and turn it over in the light. A stranger's palm, calloused at the base of the fingers. You raise your eyes.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."