Colin Petrosky

You've had two minutes in this life and they were enough. Wendell Ashworth's knees ache with a permanence that isn't yours, a deep animal creak in the joints that says this is what all your evenings will feel like now, every one of them, forever. The recliner smells like someone else's cigarettes though he never smoked. The farmhouse is quiet in the particular way of a man who eats dinner alone. You stood up once, just to see, and something in the hip caught and held. Sixty-four is not a costume you want to keep wearing. You liked the idea of him for about ninety seconds — the dad bod, the silver hair, a man built like a mountain he'd have to keep mowing — and then you felt the actual weight of him, the actual tiredness in the actual tendons, and you were done. The phone is already out. The site is already loading, the wheel already spinning under your — his — thumb before you've admitted to yourself that you're leaving. You don't say goodbye to Wendell. You never do.

The wheel stops and there's no in-between, no falling, no travel — just a breath that was ragged going shallow and even, air changing temperature in a throat that isn't the one you had a half-second ago. Streetlight comes through a gap in blackout curtains in a single hard blade, and you are lying face-down in sheets that smell like a body that sleeps hard. One arm hangs off the mattress edge, fingers loose, knuckles pale where blood has pooled. You feel it before you decide anything: the arm draws itself up, slow, unhurried, and the whole body rolls onto its back, and the hands come to rest folded on the chest like a man laid out for a viewing. You didn't choose the posture. It arrived with the body, some old comfort this man never once used while sleeping, and it is the first thing that tells you: something else is standing in here with the muscle memory, and it isn't him anymore.

The mattress is thin under your shoulder blades — you feel how little cushion there is, how the frame underneath has a give to it that speaks cheap and rented. Skinny. That's the first honest fact your new weight tells you: no meat on this one, ribs close under skin, forearms wire-thin where they cross on your chest. Twenty-five, maybe less by the feel of the joints, everything quick and unworn compared to the ache you just climbed out of.

The sheet under your palm gives you nothing. But your hand finds the hem of the t-shirt you're wearing, bunched up near your ribs from sleep, and there it is — a flash, sourceless and full: this shirt, this exact one, pulled over your head this morning — no, yesterday morning, standing in a kitchen with the window unit rattling, coffee going cold on the counter because you'd (he'd) forgotten it again, the way you always forget things the mornings after you drink too much the night before, which is most mornings. Colin Petrosky. The name comes with the shirt, stitched into nothing but arriving anyway, the way his own name always just was, unremarked, his.

More comes in pieces, keyed to whatever the body brushes against. The waistband of his boxers, worn soft — a year of mornings pulling on the work clothes hung over the same chair, corduroy pants gone stiff with soot no matter how many times they're washed, the canvas jacket that never really loses the smell of creosote and old fire no matter how far it's carried from the truck. His hands know a rope's weight before they know anything else — the brush rods jointing together, one length locked into the next, pushed up into black nothing above a client's fireplace while a homeowner in Meyerland hovers at a safe distance worried about the rug. He's good at it. Nobody ever tells him he's good at anything, but the soot falls the way he predicts it will, every time, and there's a small clean pride in that nobody sees.

The mattress again, its particular sag, brings back a woman's laugh from this bed — Danielle, gone three months now, the specific ache of her side of the closet being empty, a six-pack he drank alone on a Tuesday because Tuesdays used to be hers. He drinks more since. He'd tell you that's not why, and he'd be lying, and some sad quiet part of him knows he's lying. The curtains, the blade of streetlight — this apartment, this particular blue-black quality of Houston dusk-into-night through cheap fabric, humidity already sweating the glass before the sun's even fully down, a Friday, a strip-mall lot two blocks over lit up sodium-orange, where his truck sits parked crooked because he came home strung out on the day's work and a stop at the bar and didn't care.

The pen. Somewhere on the nightstand, though your hand hasn't found it yet, but you feel the ghost of the habit in your fingers anyway — the click, click, click he does without noticing, on invoices, in his truck at red lights, waiting for coffee, a tic that outlasted every girlfriend and every job before this one. Comfortable, this life, if you added up the numbers, though he never feels rich lying here at the day's dead end with soot under his nails that soap won't fully take.

You lie there another second in all of it — his hangover not yet arrived but promised, his loneliness sitting in the mattress like a permanent guest, his body light and quick and young in a way the last one wasn't.

Then you lift the hands off your chest and hold them up into the thin blue light, turn them over, watch the tendons shift, unfamiliar and exact, calluses along the base of the fingers from rope and rod and nothing else.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the ceiling, to whatever's left listening.