Cody Spradlin

You are leaving Glenn Haverty because of the quiet. It is the middle of the night in his house, everyone asleep, and the desert outside presses a silence on the windows that his body does not mind and you do. His knees are good. His dimples work. You stood at the kitchen counter for a while with his steady hands flat on the granite, and nothing in them wanted anything. That is the whole complaint. You had him for less than a minute, and already you could tell that he would never once surprise you. So you go back to the page, and the wheel, and you pay.

The spin comes with no warning. The kitchen is gone and the floor is carpet, thin, gritty under both kneecaps. Your weight has dropped lower and wider, and your breath comes shorter. Your hands are pressed together loosely, and your mouth is still shaped around a laugh you did not make. You are kneeling at the edge of a bed with your eyes on a clock that says 5:42. You go down from the half-stand onto both knees, and your forehead meets the bedspread. It is cool and smells of dust and old detergent.

Then he comes in through everything you touch.

The bedspread first, a quilt pilled soft, and a woman's grandmother made it, not his. Her name is not given. What comes is the warmth of being handed it in a doorway, being told you will need it in the mountains, and the feeling of being a man someone planned for. It goes as quickly as it came.

The shirt is cotton, worn thin across the belly, and the sleeves are the second thing. You get the morning in his hands: pulling it over his head in the dark so as not to wake her, one arm and then the other, the hem catching on the soft round weight at his middle that he has stopped pretending about. Sweatpants, the drawstring knotted because it frayed. No shoes. He meant to pray before anything else, and he did not mean it very hard. A habit from a church with a fellowship hall and a long coffee urn, kept up the way you keep a porch light on.

Your knuckles press the carpet. Fine ink runs along the arms, triangles, thin lines, and your skin remembers the needle. It was not pain. It was a long afternoon of being held still, and the pride afterward in a parking lot.

Then the work arrives, the whole of it. The fly rail, the rope lock under your palm, the cold of the rail at the end of a night, and a blue running light in the wings that turns every face the color of the bottom of a pool. Your hands know the weight of a counterweight arbor before it moves. They know when to let it go. You are strong in the forearms and the shoulders and soft everywhere else, and your lower back aches in the exact place he has ignored for years.

Something sour sits under your tongue. The glass on the nightstand holds water, and what he drank last night is in his blood and his mouth. Keys lie beside it. In his chest there is a small shame he has taught himself to carry lightly, and a promise, half made, that today he will skip the bar after the load-out. His thumb knows the vape in the pocket before you reach for it.

She is down the hall. You get her only as a sound, a floor that creaks in a pattern he loves, and the bridge over the creek, brown water, green shade, which he crosses every day and has never once said he finds beautiful.

You lift your head. You turn your hands over on the bedspread, the knuckles broad, the ink fine. They are not yours, and they are warm and they shake a little.

You say, quietly, to the room, "Amen." It is not for the one he meant it for. Underneath it the question sits where it always sits: how long, and when it comes back, the wanting, the page, the wheel.