Colm Gallagher

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Houston with a glass of water you don't want. The man you are wearing is asleep in the next room, or rather, he is not, because you are him. Siosaia Taufa. Six foot three, and the weight of him settles in your knees whenever you stand still. Your broken nose whistles a little on the inhale. His wife's mother is sleeping down the hall. You have been him for less than a minute of your own time, and already you know the thing that is wrong, which is that nothing is wrong. His shoulders are good. His hands are enormous and certain. The refrigerator hums in a key you could hold forever.

That's the trouble. Nothing here is yours to ruin, and nothing here is asking anything of you. You stood at his sink and felt a thousand and eighty-five bodies of wanting go quiet, and you hated the quiet. So you thumb the wheel open on his phone in the dark, and the screen paints his knuckles blue, and you pay, and you spin, and you don't say goodbye to the water.

Then there is a rug under your crossed legs.

The book is open on your knees, heavy, its pages gone soft with old water. Your mouth is already moving. You were on the third line and you stumbled, and now you go again, and the syllables come out of you like they were stored there, vowels landing in a mouth that has said them before. You don't look down. You finish the page.

Then the stillness, and the room arrives. A lamp on the right, orange. A black window. Cans on a side table. A couch with a blanket thrown across it, someone's, not yours. Dry carpet smell, dust, a little ozone caught in the flannel.

The flannel is the first thing that talks. Your arms are inside its sleeves and you feel him in the morning, his right arm first, the left cuff buttoned crooked and left that way, the shirt still warm from the dryer because she had run it for him, her hair tie on her wrist, her saying you'll ruin that one, and him saying that's what it's for. A good minute of kitchen light. You feel how much he liked being told off by her.

The pants are heavier, stiff at the thighs with years of grit. Through the denim-thick canvas comes the shop: a floor of cooling sparks, a stinging orange fleck in the crook of his wrist that he did not flinch at, the quiet pride of a bead laid clean. And money, under it, a cold figure he carries everywhere: he owes more than the truck is worth, more than anything is worth, and the number sits at the back of his jaw. Underwater. He grinds his molars on it even asleep.

The beard. You lift a hand to it and it is longer than you thought, coarse and warm, reaching the sternum. He grew it through one long winter after a woman he used to love stopped answering his messages, and kept it because it made a face he could stand behind. You catch her name nearly, a soft syllable, and it slides off.

The rug has a pattern under your palm. Your hand finds the pile and you remember kneeling here to open a box of her things when they moved in, and finding the book, in a box that wasn't hers, that wasn't anyone's he could name. He has told no one he kept reading it. Hunger, plain curiosity: what would it be to say a thing and have it answer.

His back aches, the low left side, from leaning over steel. His knees want out of the cross-legged fold. Under all of it he is strong, athletic, twenty-eight, a body that has never once been tired in a way sleep failed to fix.

You hold your hands up in the lamplight. Freckled to the wrist, calluses like coins at the base of each finger. You turn them over. They are his, and they are yours, and you don't know yet for how long.

Then you lift your eyes and say, softly, to whoever is listening, "Well. Hello, Colm."

The wheel is already somewhere behind your ribs, patient, and you wonder how long before you want it.