Craig Lindqvist

You are standing in Nathan Brandvold's kitchen in Los Angeles with the refrigerator humming and his hand flat on the counter. It is the dead middle of the night, and everything in the house is asleep except the man you are wearing. He is thirty-five and built like a man who lifts on purpose. His shoulders ache pleasantly, and the scar through his eyebrow itches when you frown. You have been him for less than a minute, and you have already worked out what is wrong. He has a phone full of people who need him by morning, a calendar, a mortgage, and a voice that apologizes before it speaks. All of that was handed to you, and none of it is yours. You wanted a man who was already in the middle of something, doing it with his hands. You wanted to arrive in motion, and standing here you can feel how much you want that. The site is open on his phone, with its wheel and its small bright button. You press it.

The cold arrives first, then the weight. The weight is in the belly and in the thighs, and you are on your feet on something that gives slightly underfoot, rubber matting over a hull. A rod is in your hands with a length of line pinched between your fingers, and the knot is half made. Your fingers were moving before you got here, and they did it wrong. Something slipped, the loop came out crooked, and the half second you have been given is the half second his hands lost their rhythm. You pull the knot out and do it again slowly. The line is thin and wet, and the water slaps the boat in the dark.

The hoodie is thin and soft against your back, washed gray a hundred times, and it brings the morning with it. You are in a garage under a house, in cold white light from the bay window above, and you are pulling the sleeves down over a black band of ink on the upper arm that you have had since you were twenty-two. A woman's voice calls something down the stairs about coffee, warm and tired and fond. A kid's sneakers lie by the door, small ones. You feel a love so ordinary it embarrasses you. The cork of the rod is worn into the shape of his palm, and it gives you the river at dawn, the same bend a thousand times, a stranger's kid catching his first trout while you hold the net and pretend not to care. Then comes a church basement with folding chairs, hard coffee, and a hymn you know the words to without wanting to. Your free hand goes up and rubs the smooth scalp, which is warm and faintly rough, and the gesture comes with the feeling of a man thinking about rent. He has almost nothing, a truck and a boat on a loan, and a wedding band you turn with your thumb. His knees complain when you shift. His back is stiff in the old, familiar way. His chin, when you touch it, has a deep cleft you did not expect. The knot cinches down tight and clean. You check it, and then you check it again, ten times, though it has not needed checking in years.

You turn your hand over. It is broad and scarred across the knuckles and cold, and the ring catches the little light there is. You lift your eyes.

"Hello," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "All right. Let's see how long you last."