Craig Allen Sutter

You are Curtis Maddox, and you have been him for three minutes. You are standing in the kitchen of his apartment with his keys in your fist, the freight-yard ache still in his shoulders from a shift that is not yours. The unibrow is itching. The stubble is wrong against your palm. A Sunday-morning Los Angeles light lies on the counter, and the coffee he made is going cold.

Nothing is wrong with him. He lifts and he carries and his knees hold. That is the trouble. Something in you, when you stood at his sink, asked what else there is, and you could not stop asking. So you open the page with the wheel on it, pay, and spin, and the kitchen goes.

Heat. Water running over your foot. A sponge in your right hand, heavy and slick, and soap sliding down a car door in wide arcs. The sun sits on your scalp, and there is no hair there to hold it off. Your grip shifts, thumb tucked, wrist turning small circles, and behind you the swirl marks stop appearing. He did that. His hands were doing something careful, and now they are doing it for you.

The sponge first. Cold suds up the wrist, and then he is there: a Saturday years ago, a boy on the hood of this same kind of car, and he is teaching the boy to wash in straight lines, not circles. Circles show in the sun. The boy does not listen. He loved that. The feeling arrives as pride with a small ache under it.

Then the shirt, wet at the collar and stuck between your shoulder blades. This morning, blue, third from the top of the drawer, because the gray one was in the wash. A woman's voice from the other room asked if he was really doing the car now, in this heat. He said yes. It is the one thing all week that stays where he puts it. He pulled the sleeve down over the black ink on the left arm, then pushed it back up when he knew the sun would find it anyway.

The hose snakes across the concrete under your shoe, and the shoe gives up another year: the code, the two monitors, the cold coffee he forgets, a deploy at three in the morning that went right. Money is a quiet fact in him. Enough. He does not think about it. What he thinks about is the pack in the shorts pocket, the first one he will light when this is done. Your lungs know the shape of that wanting already, a hunger low in the chest, fifty-three years deep.

His knees are good. His back is good and a little tight. His hands are certain.

You turn your right hand over. Water beads in the lines of the palm, and soap runs between the fingers. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, and his voice comes out lower than you expected, "hello."

The sponge drips. The hose keeps running. You do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether you will wake as him tomorrow.