Colin Reuther

You are leaving the janitor. His gold tooth keeps finding the inside of your lip, a small hard coin you have been tonguing since the elevator. Thirty-nine, a dad bod, knees like wet cardboard on the stairs. He had a closet in a basement on the east side and a mop bucket with one bad wheel. You had him for under a minute. It was not him. It was the bucket wheel's squeal against the tile, the same note every ten seconds, and under it the thing you cannot say to anyone, which is that being someone is not the same as being someone new. The wheel is on the screen. You press it.

Gravel. Cold in the nose, wet in the chest, breath standing in front of you in a white rag. You are mid-stride and your pace breaks for two steps, a stumble that never lands, and you come down on the other foot with your arms lower and your head still. The earbuds are talking in your ears. The watch on your left wrist buzzes a split it has no record of you holding.

Then the body comes up through the soles. Long legs, skinny, nothing padding anything. Your lungs are enormous and clean after the janitor's, a bellows that has never been asked for much. There's a thin ache behind the eyes and a sourness high in the throat, last night sitting in the hinges of him. He drinks. It shows in the water-heavy slackness under the skin.

The hoodie's zipper is cold against your sternum. The cuffs are chewed soft at the thumb holes, and the cotton remembers: a garage under a house, white light through a bay window above, the driveway cut so steep the car stays out. His hands pull the hoodie off a nail by the door. Left sleeve first, always. The shirt under it is gray, a size too big, and he sleeps in it, runs in it, cooks in it sometimes under the apron, because laundry is Sunday. The sweatpants are navy and the drawstring is a knot he stopped untying in the spring.

The shoes know the path. Your feet land where his have landed a few hundred mornings, and with the gravel comes a flash that is all his: the truck's window at the lunch rush, tickets stacking on the rail, the flat-top spitting, a hundred and ten degrees on his forearms, and the quiet pride of a basket coming up golden at the exact second the ticket calls for it. Nobody tells him. He knows. There's a bandana soaked through at the hairline. There's the bottle in the cab at close, which he does not look at while he is doing it.

Your right hand lifts without you and touches his face, the patchy beard, the bare gaps on the cheeks where it still hasn't come in. The fingers do this when he isn't thinking. It is a comfort. A tiny one, and it works on you too.

His mother's rosary is in the dresser drawer. You feel the weight of it with no object anywhere near, just the shape of a Sunday he skipped and a small clean guilt.

The watch buzzes again. The fog sits on the canal like milk. You slow, and stop, and the gravel ticks under your shoes.

You hold your arm out. The tattoo on the inner forearm is bold black line, a faded red, the color gone soft. You turn the hand over. The skin is young and the knuckles are narrow and you have never worn this before.

You look up at the water and say, "Okay. Hi."

Your breath goes out white. You don't know if you have an hour. You don't know if you'll still be here by the time the fog lifts, or if the wanting is already stirring somewhere under his ribs, patient and quiet, waiting to ask.