Colton Brewer

You are fifty-four and your knees know it. Standing at the bathroom mirror in Philadelphia, you are the manager, the freckles, the short beard going gray at the chin, the tie half knotted. Your wife's side of the closet is a spare room to you. The man you were wearing yesterday had a wife you did not love and a daughter's voicemail you did not return. Twenty-six hours of him were enough. In the mirror, his mouth says the number of the meeting. You are bored, and it is worse than that: you hear the kettle downstairs and know the day, every minute of it, before it has happened. You open the laptop on the dresser. The wheel is already there, ticking in its slot like a patient animal. You pay. You spin.

Dark. A mattress under your shoulder, a warm weight on your hip, a rectangle of blue six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped on something, and your breath is slow and wide in a chest that is much larger than the one you left. The thumb moves. It is faster than he would have moved it, and it flicks past everything he had stopped on.

Gum. There is gum in your mouth, gone flat and sweet, and your jaw keeps working it without asking you. Then the shirt. The cotton is soft with washing against your shoulder blades, and the memory comes up through it: his hands pulling it over his head last night, tired, the gray one because the black ones were in the hamper. He has a shift later, the casino employee entrance, the long walk through the heat of the lot. He works nights and sleeps mornings, and he is awake in the dark with the blinds slatted against a sky that is not yet any color.

The phone is warm in your palm. Through it comes her name, a recent ex-girlfriend, a text thread he had scrolled up and up through before you arrived. It has the weight of a swallowed stone, not a clean grief. You feel him wanting to type something and not typing.

Sheets under your legs. Plaid pajama pants, drawstring loose at the hip, and the fabric brings Sunday: a folding chair, a church basement, coffee in a paper cup, his mother's hand on his neck while the pastor prayed. He believes it. It is in him like a beam in a wall. Debt is in him too, a number with a minus in front of it, the tuition he signed for at eighteen with a steady hand and a sick stomach.

The body is thick and strong. The arms are heavy and hard under the soft, the belly rises and falls against the blanket, the thighs are warm, and your eighteen-year-old heart goes on, easy and loud. Nothing aches. You have not felt nothing aching in decades. On the right forearm, fine geometric lines catch the light of the screen. When he got them, the needle was a bee that would not stop, and his friend laughed in the next chair.

You set the phone on your chest. The room is a lamp, a water bottle, keys and coins on the nightstand. You lift your hand and turn it over. It is wide, young and unmarked at the knuckles, and the gum clicks once in your cheek.

You look up and say, to the dark, "Okay. Hi."

Your voice is lower than you expected, and it is not yours. Somewhere past the blinds a car goes by, and you wait to feel how long this will hold, and when the wanting will come back.