Curtis Delano Maddox

You are Dennis Wayne Pruett, and Dennis has a gap between his front teeth that your tongue won't stop finding. Five hours of it. You sit in the bus driver's kitchen in Las Vegas, mid-morning on a Sunday, light flat on the table, and you press your tongue into the gap like a bruise. The red beard itches. The blue eyes are fine. The knees are fine. Nothing is wrong with him.

That is the trouble. At the sink, his phone buzzes with a text from a sister who thinks you are him, and you read it and feel nothing. It asks whether you're coming Sunday. You can't answer, because you don't know which Sunday. His whole life sits in the cupboards, unfinished, and you've been reading it like a menu in another language. The wheel is still open in a tab. You tell yourself you're only looking.

You pay. You spin.

The fork stops halfway to your mouth. Then it comes down, and your hand is the one holding it.

The room is cold and smells of reheated pasta, tomato, and old dish soap. A coat is heavy on your shoulders, zipped to the breastbone. Your jaw is working a mouthful you didn't chew. The window over the sink is pale and the day is somewhere else. The left leg is bouncing against the cabinet, a quick tap, tap, tap you didn't order and can't stop. You let it.

You swallow. The container is warm in your left palm, thin plastic flexing under your thumb, and the plastic gives you something. A Sunday, a church basement, a foil pan just like this one passed hand to hand. A woman's voice says *take it home, Curtis, you don't eat*. It comes with shame, and under the shame the plain love of being fed. You are not feeling it. He is, from somewhere you cannot reach.

The coat's cuff rubs your wrist. Nylon, a zipper pull cold as a coin. The morning comes up through the sleeves: his right arm going in first because the left shoulder aches, the zipper dragged up fast, a vest and gloves waiting in the truck. A warehouse door, a trailer mouth open like a throat. Boxes. He has stacked ten thousand of them. His back remembers each one, a low ache across the belt line that settles when you shift your weight. Your belly sits soft over the waistband, a father's belly, and your thighs are solid from lifting.

The fork's handle is thin and bent at the neck. You turn it, and he is at a kitchen table with three kids' homework spread across it, a pencil too small for his fingers, a girl saying *Daddy, you're doing it wrong*. And her mother in the doorway, an ex, laughing, once, before the laughing stopped. It lands in the chest like a stone dropped in a well.

Under the sleeve, high on the arm, the skin remembers a needle. A unit insignia, half hidden. You don't look. Gravel, a heat that wasn't this heat, men's voices, a name he doesn't say anymore. His thumb finds a cigarette that isn't there. Eleven years quit, and the hand still goes looking.

You set the fork down. The wood of the counter is cool and gritty with crumbs. You shrug the coat off and the room's cold climbs your arms, and you sit.

You hold your hands up in the gray window light. They are broad, brown, scarred across the knuckles, the nails short and cracked. The fingers curl as you close them. You turn them over, palms up, and lift your eyes to the glass.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is deeper than yours, slower. "Okay. You're mine."

The leg keeps bouncing. You wonder how long before you want something else.