Colby Rasnick

Gary Pruett's classroom smells like dry-erase marker and the radiator that never shuts off, except Gary Pruett is not standing in it — you are, wearing him, seven minutes into a life that fits like somebody else's coat. Before that you were Marcus Duvall, and before that you were nothing anyone would recognize, and the seven minutes have not been kind to Gary: heavy, sixty-three, a bad hip announcing itself every time you shift weight on the tile. You spun for a teacher and got one, and you already know you're not staying. It isn't the hip. It's that you left Marcus's kitchen without checking on the second bedroom, and something about that unfinished business is sitting in Gary's gray eyes like a held breath. You know exactly who's in that second bedroom. You lived it from the other side seven minutes ago — the roommate, the beekeeper, the one who leaves honey on the counter in a jar with a crooked label and never once complained about Marcus's night terrors coming through the wall. Unfinished. You open the site again standing at the whiteboard, Gary's hand — thick-knuckled, a wedding ring worn thin — on the mouse, and you spin knowing exactly what you're hunting even if you'd never say it that plainly to yourself.

It gives you him.

The bar is under your palms before you know you have palms — knurling biting the meat of them, ten pounds heavier on each end than he's touched all year, and his body take the sudden math like a held note going sharp. Air leaves through his teeth a beat before the rep is done, not after. The gym noise arrives all at once: a plate dropped two racks over, a fan somewhere, a phone's bass leaking out of somebody's pocket. His legs are locked, his forearms are shaking, and you are inside all of it, riding a chest that is not blowing out the way it should on a last rep — no grimace, no grinding jaw. Just quiet. Grinding it out anyway, slow, like the body knows something changed and hasn't decided whether to be afraid of it.

Then his hands remember for you, because that's the only door in.

The bar's cold knurl gives you a summer — him at nineteen, first real muscle coming in, his father's voice saying good, good, keep your back straight, before the aneurysm took his father out of a Tuesday afternoon and left this exact tattoo three years later: cross, praying hands, inner forearm, done in a shop in Bay Ridge by a guy who charged him half price because he liked the story. Faith without the building around it. Something you talk to on good mornings in the bee yard and don't call God out loud.

The gloves aren't on him now but the memory of gloves comes anyway, riding up through his palms like an echo — canvas stiff with old propolis, the particular weight of a frame lifted slow out of a super so the bees don't feel the shift, three thousand of them lifting off the comb in a sound like a held chord. The smoker's handle worn smooth in the exact place his right hand always finds it. He is careful with them the way he has never learned to be careful with himself: forty hives behind a warehouse in Red Hook, rent split three ways, most of it going to a roommate — Marcus, gone into the Army reserve weekends, gone quiet some nights with something he brought home from overseas that neither of them names — and you know that quiet from underneath, you were inside it seven minutes ago, the two of them eating cereal standing up at 2 a.m. because neither one could sleep and neither one asked why.

The shirt against his back gives you this morning — his morning, seventeen hours behind yours, already gone: pulling it over his head in a room with one window painted shut, humidity outside heavy enough to change your mind about beekeeping in July, his girlfriend's voice from the hallway asking if he wants eggs, him saying no, gonna eat after, and meaning it, and then not eating after because a hive swarmed and by the time he got it settled it was dark. His head, remembering itself: the migraine that camped behind his left eye all afternoon, the same one that visits two, three times a month and that he has stopped mentioning to her because mentioning things makes them realer. The cigarette he didn't have. Four days clean and his jaw still tightens for one anyway, muscle memory reaching for a thing that isn't there, same as his hands are reaching for a bar that is.

His shoes on the rubber floor give you nothing — new sneakers, still learning him — but his knees give you every mile he's put on them, squat depth, box height, the particular joy of a body used well and used often, twenty-six years old and mostly unbroken, mostly.

You feel him arrive under your own arrival, which is the strangest part: two men's worth of care for the same set of shoulders, his without knowing, yours because you've been in the room next to this one.

The bar racks. Your palms — his palms — come up in front of your face without your telling them to, and you turn them over under the gym lights like they might have an explanation written on them.

You look up into the mirror across the rack, into brown eyes that were his a second and a half ago and are now unmistakably someone looking out from behind them for the first time, and you say, out loud, to no one on the bench beside you because there is no one:

"Marcus, you'd better still have my honey in that fridge."