Cody Hendricks

The facts say asleep, in the middle of the night, and a grocery stocker on the day shift would be asleep then. That is the first thing I have to hold: he works days, up at four. The picture shows a tattooed sleeve on the hanging arm. The facts give no tattoo, and the picture wins only for the clip, so I use it only there and don't build the story on it.

You are Kyle Brennecke still, for another minute. Miami, a Thursday in the dead hours, and you are sitting on the edge of a stranger's bed in a body that works perfectly. Patchy beard, brown eyes, a man between jobs. The fridge hums. You've been him less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong: nothing. Nothing is wrong, and that is the trouble. There was nothing in him to want, no ache you could press, and in the quiet you notice you had paid for a hunger and been given a man with none. So you open the page. The wheel is already turning before you decide it.

Then you are lying face-down in sheets that smell of someone else's detergent and a pack a day. Your breath is ragged and then it is even, in one pull. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains, orange, with a little neon in it from a back alley. Your arm hangs off the mattress. You draw it up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest, and some distant part of you registers that this is a way he has never once slept.

The memories come only through touch. The sheet under your palm is cotton gone soft from washing, and a Saturday opens: a woman laughing as she fights a fitted corner onto this mattress, and his feeling is a quiet, enormous *mine*. The wedding band is cool against your sternum, and you are in a church with a low ceiling, his knees shaking in his rented shoes, a priest saying words he half knew from his mother. Your thumb finds the ring and turns it, and the memory goes warm and plain.

The T-shirt on your ribs is thin and soft at the collar. It is last night's, and with it comes his morning, pulled over his head in the dark of the closet so as not to wake anyone: the left arm first, because the shoulder clicks, then the right. Before that the jeans, one leg at a time, belt through the loops by feel. The vest on its hook by the door with the lanyard coiled in the pocket. Your fingers, which are his, would know the retractable badge reel without looking.

Your tongue finds a ragged edge on a thumbnail, and then you realize you are biting it. His hands do this. In the dark you taste salt and cardboard, and you feel a shame he has carried since he was twelve.

Under it all is the body. Twenty-nine years old, five-ten, lean from lifting cases. The low back aches with a pleasant, earned heat. Your lungs are tight and want a cigarette; the wanting is his, and it is sharp. Your nose is clogged on one side where it was broken once and set a little crooked, and you can breathe through it only if you try. Down the hall, someone small turns over in sleep. You feel him, the child, as a tug under the ribs, and it is not yours, and it is in you anyway.

You lift your hands into the orange light and turn them over. They are scarred across the knuckles from box cutters, nails bitten to the quick, the ring bright. They are warm, and they are not yours, and they answer.

You look up at the ceiling and say, quietly, "Okay. Okay, you."

And under the words, the same small question you always carry: how long.