Colin Maguire

You are Eli Brandt, eighteen, five-five, and you are standing at a bathroom mirror in Los Angeles in the dark. Your house is asleep. You have been him for four minutes. His knees are good, his shoulders are quick, and every part of him works. That is the problem. You came to the wheel to be someone, and you spent four minutes in a boy who could do everything and had nothing in him that you wanted. His phone is on the sink, lit, and the page is already open: a wheel with its painted wedges. You pay with his card. You spin. You think, not unkindly, goodbye to the boy in the glass.

The wheel clicks. Then there is no mirror.

There is a mattress under your whole front, and a pillow wet at one corner where his mouth has been. One arm hangs off the bed, and the blood has gone heavy in it. His breath is ragged, then even, in one pull. The arm draws itself up. The body rolls to its back, and the hands fold on the chest. You did not decide it. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the blanket like a knife.

Then he comes back through what touches you.

The T-shirt, soft and worn thin at the collar, gives you a morning in a laundromat. He is twenty-six, and his wife is folding his clothes while he talks about a case he is going to lose. She says, "You always do this before you win." The plaid pants give you the same wife, a Christmas, and a pair of pajamas in a box. She had to explain the joke. He laughed anyway, because he loved that she tried.

The ring is cold on your finger. It gives you the altar rail of a church with bad carpet, a pastor's hand on his shoulder, and a vow so frightened that it felt like a fever. Under that is the other thing, which nobody knows. A text sits unsent in him, to the girl before his wife. He wrote it eleven times and deleted it eleven times. The shame is his, and so is the wanting, and neither is yours. You feel them anyway.

The sheets are cotton and cool. They give you the suit from the portrait, the gray one. He puts it on in the dark of a Monday: the white shirt, one sleeve and then the other, the cuff buttons fumbled with numb fingers, the navy tie knotted twice because the first try ran short. Courthouse steps, wind off the lake, briefcase strap biting his palm. He prays the quick prayer he always prays, one breath long, before he goes in.

The body underneath all this is honest. It is twenty-nine, slight, and stiff in the lower back from too many hours bent over documents. His jaw is smooth and his scalp is sore. Your fingers are drumming the sternum, and they know a rhythm you never taught them.

You lift your hand into the streetlight and turn it over. Freckles reach down to the knuckles. The band catches the light.

You look up and say, to the ceiling, to the wheel, to him, "Hello, Colin."

Somewhere under your ribs, a question begins to tick: how long.