Colby Hartzler

You are standing at a kitchen window in Leonard Whitehorse's body, and the house behind you is asleep. Four minutes in, and the pension check is already on the counter and the dog is already following you from room to room. You have his knees, which are fine, and his quiet, which is enormous. You went to the site because the quiet had a shape. Nobody in this man's life needs anything, and neither do you, and you find you can't stand it. You open the laptop and the wheel is there, waiting. His thumb, your thumb, comes down.

Then you are kneeling.

Carpet under both kneecaps, thick and cheap. A lamp on, a clock glowing blue beside it. Your hands are laced together in front of a belly that sits softly against the thighs. Your mouth is already making a shape, half a laugh, and the word *amen* is still in it. You were standing up. You were halfway. Your legs give you back down and the smile leaves mid-breath, and your forehead meets the bedspread.

Cotton against your face. Detergent, and under it something like a warm engine.

The t-shirt is soft at the collar and it hands you a night first. Not tonight. A shift, a bay, a semi's cab tipped up on its hinge like a jaw, and a voice behind him saying *you ever going to fix your own truck?* He laughed, with the gap in his teeth showing, and the shame in it comes up your throat like heartburn. The truck is the thing that's underwater. Twenty-five thousand, more than it's worth, and he does the math on it lying awake.

The sweatpants are worn thin at the knee. Your leg is bouncing on the carpet, the left, steady as a pulse, and it won't stop when you tell it to. It has never stopped. He bounced that leg in school and at his grandfather's funeral and under the table at the bank, and a loan officer once looked at it and then at him.

Your tongue finds the gap in the front teeth. He hated it at fourteen and then stopped caring, and at twenty-two a girl told him it was the best thing about him. He believed her for a week.

The bedspread under your fingers is the one his mother bought. You get a Saturday, a store in Mansfield, her holding two colors up. Then nothing else of her comes, only the smell of the store.

Your hair is in your eyes, long past the ears and onto the collar, and a hand knows to push it back. The calluses scrape against your forehead. They are hard at the base of each finger, and you know what they are for without being told: a torque wrench, a breaker bar, a thousand lug nuts. A vape sits on the nightstand, and your whole mouth wants it before you have decided anything. The ache in your lower back is a day of leaning under a raised cab. The size of the body is almost funny. It is so tall that the floor feels far away.

He was praying, not seriously. You can feel that in the muscles of his face, the joke he was making at the ceiling. He didn't believe anyone was listening. Someone was.

You push up off the bedspread and sit back on your heels. The clock says what it says. You hold your hands out in the lamplight and turn them over, scarred by work and by no one's design but his, and they are yours.

You look up, and you say, to the dark room, in his low voice, "Well. That got answered."

The leg bounces. You wonder how long you get, and whether tomorrow you will still be standing in this.