Connor Brzezinski

You are in Wayne Ketterman's kitchen in Dallas, and the coffee has gone cold in his big freckled hand. A few minutes ago he was a man who had never been anyone else. His knees ache. His beard is silver and scratches at the collar. In the window over the sink there is a bright flat afternoon, and you have been standing in it too long.

It was the stillness that sent you back. His wife's chair at the table is empty and the whole house is arranged around that, quiet in the way a held breath is quiet. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. He is simply finished, and you can feel the end of him like a wall in a dark room. You set the cup down. The phone is already open to the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin.

The wind stops.

It stops all at once, as though a hand were laid over the world's mouth. You are standing on gray boards, one boot forward, the screen door still clattering against its frame behind you and then not clattering. Ahead of you the cloud crosses the field, green-black, a wall with an orange seam of light under it. The air is dead and heavy. You are young. That arrives first, before anything: the lightness of the knees, the long clean pull of the spine, breath that goes all the way down and comes back without being asked.

Your weight is already tipping forward. He was going in, you think, and you turn your body the other way, off the porch toward the field, chin up, hands loose. The porch was built to keep this out. You walk into it anyway.

Then the cotton against your shoulders gives you the first thing. A navy tee, washed thin. This morning, in a dark room: he pulled it from the floor of a closet, sniffed it, decided it would do. He put his left arm through first, always the left. The tattoo on the upper arm is half under the sleeve, script, a name and a date, and when the cloth brushes it you feel a hot flat grief that is not yours. Her name. His grandmother's, the date a funeral, the Mass at Saint Hedwig's, the incense in his hair for a week.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. He dressed in the dark because his roommate sleeps days. He found the belt by feel. The boots are heavy and cracked at the toe, and lacing them his hands did it without him, double knot, tug, the way he does it forty times a month. Those hands know things. They know the weight of a rack of glasses, the scald of a pit sprayer, how to hold a plate by the rim so the steam doesn't reach the wrist. The skin on the knuckles is raw and pink. The palms are rough and wrinkled, as though they have been in water all day, because they have.

The boards under you give a small groan, and a different year opens. A girl on these same steps, laughing, her bare feet on the paint. She is leaving. She is not cruel about it. She says he's always so tired, and he says nothing, and that nothing is the thing he turns over at night. You feel his ache for her and it sits in the chest like a swallowed stone.

You breathe it in. Wet dust, cut grass, the cold metallic edge of rain not yet fallen. His sweat has the smell of dish soap under it, and bleach. Your jaw is clean under the short beard. On one cheek, high up, you can feel a small raised dot when the skin moves.

Thunder, far off, a long cracked roll.

You stop at the grass. You hold your hands up in front of you in the green light and turn them over. Young skin, a scar of nothing, the pulse going in the wrist like a small fast animal. They are yours, and they are not.

You lift your eyes to the cloud and say, quietly, "Let's see how long."

The first drop hits your forehead. Somewhere a wheel is waiting, and you cannot tell if you will want it again tonight or in four minutes.