Colby Aucoin

The hand doesn't work right, and that is the whole problem with Reginald Odom. Not the missing one — the prosthetic is fine, clever even, does what it's told — but the real one, the left, spotted and soft, sales-rep hands that have shaken ten thousand other hands and closed nothing that mattered. Sunday afternoon light through a window that needs washing. A recliner that exhales when he sits in it. Fifty-seven years old and heavy in the gut in a way that isn't muscle settling, it's just weight, just time, and you've been him for four minutes and already you know: this was a mistake, or it was never meant to be more than a hallway. You didn't come here to live in Reginald. You came here to leave him faster than you arrived. The laptop is already open on the TV tray. The site loads the way it always loads, patient, a little smug, the wheel already spinning behind the paywall like it knew you'd be back before you did. You don't think about why. You never really do. There's a hunger under the boredom that doesn't have a name, only a shape, and the shape is always: not this one. Give me a different one. You click. You pay. Somewhere a wheel that isn't a wheel does whatever it does, and New York afternoon goes white at the edges.

And then you are twenty-one and cold-boned with a strength that isn't fat hiding it, standing at a counter you don't own the memory of yet, a fork's weight still living in fingers that are not spotted, not old, not machine at the wrist. You feel yourself set the fork down — his hand does it, muscle doing what it always does before thought catches up, and you are only a passenger for that half-second, riding down with it. Sun through a window that isn't the same window. Something warm still zipped to your chest. Coat. You shrug it off because the body wants to, because sitting down bare-armed in this kitchen is what happens next in a sequence you haven't been shown yet, and you let it happen, because you don't know any better yet either.

The jacket slides off your shoulders and the first thing that comes isn't a memory, it's a temperature — this morning, cold enough that his breath fogged on the porch, cold enough for New Orleans in a way that surprised him even though it happens every year around this time, a wet, mean, two-hour cold before the sun burns it off. The jacket had been on a hook by the door and he'd put it on the way he puts on everything, without looking, sleeve, sleeve, zip, and underneath it he remembers — no, it remembers, in the shoulders, in the specific give of the seams — a locker room this morning smelling like bleach and eucalyptus rub, tape being torn in long strips somewhere behind him, someone laughing too loud about something that wasn't funny. Practice. Contact drills. The particular ache sitting now in both knees isn't yours and it isn't imagined, either — it's real, it's his, filed under normal the way anybody's is who has been doing this since he was fourteen. A body that knows what to do with itself. Chin down, hips first, let the pads do the deciding — footwork memory sitting in the balls of the feet like a language you didn't have to learn on purpose because it was already there when the rest of him showed up.

The counter under your palms is cold tile and it gives you the kitchen whole: the cabinets somebody stained too dark for the light this room gets, the pendant lamp with the bulb that hums, the shotgun house one room wide that he picked because it was cheap and because the landlord didn't blink at the hair, the skin, any of it — didn't ask the questions people ask, the sunglasses-inside, you-okay, are-you-sick questions he stopped answering politely sometime around sixteen. The earring is a small cold weight tugging at the left lobe and it brings back a night two years ago, a friend with a needle and a lighter and too much beer, both of them laughing at how straight it came out on the first try. His hands, when you're not steering them, want to crack the knuckles — you feel the want arrive before you let it happen, one hand then the other, a small percussion he's done since he was a kid watching his father do the same at a kitchen table very much like this one, in a different city, a long time before any of this.

There's no one waiting on him tonight. No one texting to ask if he ate. The ex who mattered stopped mattering before she was even really an ex, more a season that ended, and he didn't grieve it so much as notice, months later, that he hadn't. He drinks when there's a reason to, keeps a tin of pouches in whichever pocket isn't already full, and otherwise keeps his own hours, his own count, answers to a coaching staff and nobody after that. The container in your hand is takeout from two nights ago, reheated, and the fork is already moving again in even mouthful rhythm, his rhythm, not needing you for it at all. You are only watching now, the way you watch all of them for a while before the wanting gets loud again — watching his reflection do nothing in the dark window glass, watching a face that has spent twenty-one years being looked at first and listened to second, pale in every light there is, good at pretending that's fine.

You look down at the hand holding the fork — his hand, blunt-nailed, a knuckle already faintly popped from the habit you just let it have — and you turn it over slow, both sides, like it might come with instructions the other one didn't.

Then you lift your eyes to the window, to nothing, because there's no one else in the room to say it to, and you say it anyway, quiet, testing how it sits in a voice that isn't yours yet either:

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