Conor Whelan

Dale Hargis's jaw aches from a night of not saying anything. You are standing in his kitchen in Eastern Kentucky with the refrigerator ticking and the whole house asleep. Dale is short and solid, with a beard that has gone coarse and a scar through the eyebrow that your thumb keeps finding. You have been him for less than a minute. You are already bored of his reach. The top shelf is somebody else's shelf. You stood at the cabinet and could not get the good glasses down without the stepstool, and the stepstool was in the garage, and the garage was the other side of a dog. It is a small thing. It is always a small thing. You open the page with the wheel on it and pay.

The wheel clicks and the kitchen goes.

You are crouched. Your knees are bent hard and your thighs take the weight easily, because they are young. A fluorescent tube hums overhead and the air smells of detergent and hot lint. There is one sock in your right hand, damp-warm, grey with a blue heel. The dryer door is open against your shoulder. You are tall now, and the ceiling pipes are close.

The sock comes first. It goes through the pad of your thumb and into a hallway, a small voice calling a name from the top of the stairs. Then the sweatshirt on your back, soft and worn thin at the cuffs. He pulled it on in the dark that morning, left arm first, because his girlfriend's alarm had gone off and he wanted to be out of the bed before she had to see him lie there. He is twenty-four and has been tired for two years. The sweatpants slide on your knees. He stepped into them standing at the dresser, one hand on the drawer where eight shirts lie crumpled, and thought, not for the first time, that he cannot fold anything upstairs and can fold anything down here. Down here no one asks him for anything. Your hands know it. They are already reaching into the basket, and you did not tell them to.

The concrete is cold through the soles of the sneakers. The smell of the basement brings up a church basement in a different year, folding chairs, his mother's hymn, a boy's prayer that he be good. He drank at nineteen to keep it quiet and he is still drinking. There is a bottle behind the paint cans, and your mouth knows its taste before you do. The backpack upstairs by the door is small and covered in printed leaves. It belongs to his daughter, and her weight on his chest at night is the best thing he owns. He owns almost nothing, under five thousand dollars of anything, and he clenches his jaw about it all day. You feel it, the hinge tightening, the molars set.

He loves two people and has never told anyone he has loved a man too. You know that now, and it is not yours, and you carry it anyway.

You lift your right hand. The sock hangs from it, and the fingers are long, with calluses where the basket handles bite. You turn it over once. Then you look up at the white brick and the black little window, and you say, quietly, to nobody, "Well. Hello." You wonder how long this one will last, whether the wanting comes back by morning, whether you are still him tomorrow.