Colm Ferris

You were Elias Khoury for less than a minute, and the whole time you were him you kept checking the monitor on his desk. The grid of a half-finished logo sat there with its margins perfect, and your fingers on his mouse knew exactly what to do. You did not want to do it. It was a Tuesday afternoon in Atlanta, the window behind you full of flat white sky, and a man's body that worked in every particular sat in a chair that fit it. Nothing was wrong. That was the wrong of it. Everything you reached for was already in reach.

So you opened the page with the wheel on it, and your gray goatee tightened where you pressed your lips together, and you paid.

Light. Heat on the back of the neck like a hand laid flat. You are mid-stride, a crate hanging from your right hand, and the rhythm of the walk is already in your legs. Your wrist jerks. One motion wrong, a beet half-pulled and dropped back. You do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, because something in you has never trusted this body's ease.

Your jaw is working. There is gum in your mouth, cinnamon gone to rubber, and you did not put it there. Chewing is the first thing he gives you, and it comes before any memory does.

The crate handle is rough pine, worn smooth at one spot by a thumb. You grip it and a flash comes: a loading dock, a man named Dev shouting a price, and Colm, twenty, standing very straight because it was the first week and he wanted the work. Pride, then the sting of a splinter. It is his feeling, not yours.

The vest is stiff canvas with the nap rubbed off at the pockets. Against your back it carries a morning. He put it on in a dark room because the day was going to be a hundred and eleven by noon. He did the shirt first, blue chambray, one button at a time, the cuffs rolled twice, tight, so they wouldn't catch. The bandana came last, burgundy, tied by feel at the neck over the ink there, the fine-line triangles he paid for in installments. His boyfriend's thumb had traced them last night in the dark, slow, lazy, and said nothing. The tenderness arrives whole and it staggers you, because it is so much bigger than anything you came here wanting.

The hat string is rough under your chin. Under your boots the dirt is warm through the soles, and your arches ache the way a body aches that has done this since six. Your calves are tight and strong. Your shoulders are narrow, a smaller frame than you expected. There is no mirror for this: the red hair is heavy on your collar, and the moustache lifts when you breathe out.

Somewhere beyond the row a truck idles on gravel, and the saguaros stand around the field like men waiting for a ride. You smell sun on leaves, green and iron-sweet. The beets knock together in the crate, and he knew each one by weight. Money flickers, thin, rent and a phone bill and a number he checks every Friday. A quiet belief that the land is listening, which he never says aloud.

You turn your free hand over. The geometric lines on the back of it, fine as wire, are his, and the palm is cracked and stained purple at the creases. You look up.

"Okay," you say, and his voice comes out lower than you thought it would, with a laugh caught in it. "Okay. You're mine now."

The gum clicks. You wait to feel the next wanting arrive, and you do not know how long this one gives you before it does.