Colin Gallagher

You are standing in a kitchen in Rural Texas, in Wade Lundgren's body, and the house is asleep around you. His knees ache from the cab. His thumb keeps worrying the chinstrap beard he shaved off the top of his head and never off his jaw. Three minutes you've been him. The refrigerator hums, and you open it only to hear that it works. A man who could not fix a thing like this should not have been so easy to be. You wanted a man who knew what a compressor wants. That is all you will say about it.

The laptop is warm. The wheel turns.

Then the mattress is under your whole front, and the pillow has gone. One arm hangs into cold air. Your breath is ragged, then it isn't. You roll. The arm climbs up of its own will, and the hands fold on your chest, a posture this body has never slept in.

The streetlight comes through the gap in the curtains, and the shirt against your ribs is soft with washing. Cotton, cuffless sleeves. A flash: a Thursday, Colin pulling it over his head in a dark hallway because the other shirt smelled of refrigerant oil and he was too tired to care. His mother's voice downstairs, or the church's, a hymn on a phone speaker. He thinks of his own back-room mornings, the walk-in fogging open, the gauge hoses over his shoulder, blue and red and yellow, cold on his collar.

The sweatpants are loose at the ankle. Under them, memory: the first paycheck, folded twice and held like a bird. He has put some away. Not much. Twenty-some thousand, then more, and a quiet pride in never saying the number. A pouch sits behind his lip, a ghost of mint; the habit comes up the throat before you know it. Beer only a few times a year, at his cousin's, a guilt with a pleasant taste.

The carpet beside the bed is rough under your fingertips where the hand dangled. A flash: a rowhouse step worn hollow in the marble, first sun down the block, his boots finding the dip in it every morning. He is eighteen. His shoulders are strong from lifting condensers, and his back hurts exactly where a compressor once pulled it. At the top of the ear, the little cartilage ring is cold against the pillowcase. He got it on a dare he pretended wasn't one.

You turn your hands over. Freckled wrists, short clean nails, a burn scar you can't find because the facts say there is none. They are plain. They are his. They are yours.

You look up at the dark window, the light in the gap, and say in a voice that has never said it, "Okay, Colin. Hi."

Somewhere under it the wanting is already asleep, and you do not know how long it will stay that way.