Curtis Allen Brewer

You have the page open and nothing else to do with the evening. The day is finished and the scrolling has gone stale. You have been reading about waking up as somebody else since before you knew the word for it, in films, in stories, in threads at two in the morning. Every one of them ended where the page ended. This one has a wheel on it and a button that takes payment. You tell yourself it won't work, and you pay anyway, and you spin.

The bench is hard under you. Your forearms rest on your knees and your breath is still coming back from somewhere. A water bottle sweats on the concrete by your boot. Under the bare bulb the room is cold, and the window beyond is blue with the hour before anything opens. You have stopped blowing through your teeth a minute early. Your hands are already moving to the bar, wider than they have been all year, and you take the weight and grind it up slow.

Then the stillness, and everything is yours to touch.

The jacket is canvas, heavy, and soft at the cuffs. It brings the morning in sleeve by sleeve: the left arm first because the shoulder is stiff, then the right, and the zipper pulled to the sternum in a dark kitchen while the coffee ticked. A woman's voice from the hall said *call me from Amarillo*. The wedding band is warm under your thumb, and you turn it once. It comes with a pressure in the chest that is not yours, an old gratitude with no ceremony in it, a pew, a folding chair, a hand held through a prayer in a hospital corridor. Two children's heights are marked in pencil on a doorframe. Something older sits behind them, a first wife, a voice on a phone, a settled courtesy worn smooth over years.

The jeans hold the day's first memory, a gas pump at dawn and the click of a lighter. Your right hand finds the lighter in the pocket without being told. It flips, once and again, the old rhythm, a habit left over from cigarettes he quit. Your thumb wants the wheel. Your lungs remember wanting.

The body is forty-one and means it. The knees ache a little. The lower back has hauled freight for years and is tight like a rope under load. The forearms are strong and the shoulders are not what they were. Coarse curls sit on your head and a short beard is at your jaw. Your breath comes thick. Under all of it is the faint pride of a man who built a decent life out of long hours and never told anyone what it cost him.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The ring catches the bulb. It is your hand now, and you look up.

"Okay," you say, low, to whoever is looking. "Okay. So it's real."

You close the hand. It closes. You wonder how long it lasts, and when the wanting comes back for the next one.