Colby Haskins

You are standing in a bathroom in Honolulu with a razor in your hand, in a body that is five foot three and all rope and pressure, and you have been Marcos Villanueva for two minutes. The uniform hangs on the door. His badge is the weight of a coin in a fountain. It's nearly midnight, and he has a shift in the morning, and a mother who calls on Mondays, and you stand there understanding that all of it is a coat that fits and that you cannot make yourself want it. Short men who are cops carry themselves like a closed fist. You are tired of the fist. You want height. You want to look down at a ceiling light. You set the razor on the sink and open the page, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the wind stops.

All of it, at once, as if a hand had closed over the world. You are on a porch. A screen door slaps shut behind you and the sound goes nowhere, because the air has gone dead and heavy. Ahead, over the field, a wall of cloud the color of a bruise gone green is crossing the dark. You are tall now. The floor is much farther down. Your chin is up and your hands hang loose and your boots are already moving, off the boards and toward the weather the porch was built to keep out.

The first thing to come is the flannel. It rubs your neck, and you are in his hands at some early hour, pushing through the sleeves with a mug on the dryer, the cuffs gone soft and one button hanging by a thread he keeps promising to fix. He wears it because it was his father's size once, or the size he wanted to be. Then the shirt under it, gray-brown, stiff at the hem with something dried. A stockroom smell comes up: cardboard, box cutter, pallet wrap. He is a manager, twenty-two, and the keys on his belt are heavier than his pay. The denim is stiff across the thighs. In the pocket your thumb finds a folded paper, and the number on it is a debt, a sum he does not say aloud, and the dread of it sits low in his stomach like a swallowed stone.

The boots give you the gravel road, the long walk, the barbed wire snagging a sleeve, the water tower on the horizon blinking its red lamp. Then a girl on that road with the window down, laughing at him. An old girlfriend. The ache that comes with her is small and square and he keeps it folded. Beer on a tailgate. A cigarette, only when he drinks, lit off a stranger's lighter. A rosary pushed into his palm by a grandmother, and he did not hand it back for years.

His eye drifts outward. You feel it, the soft slide of one eye away from the other, and the storm splits into two slightly different storms, and you let it. Your knees are good. Your back is young. Your calves know the ground. The cold arrives on his skin before the rain does.

You lift your hands. Big knuckles, calluses across the base of the fingers, a split nail. You turn them over. They are warm, they are yours, and they do not know you yet. You look up at the green dark.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower than the last one. "Look at that."

Somewhere under your ribs, the wanting is already stirring, small as a pulse. You do not know how long he holds. You only know the rain has not started yet.