Curtis Landgraf

You are Sione Fonoti, and Sione's knees are the reason.

It is the end of a Miami Sunday, the light going orange over the parking lot, and you are standing at his kitchen counter holding a can of beans you cannot open. The pull-tab bends and your thumb will not close on the ring. His hand has done this all day: the grip goes out of it mid-motion and comes back like a tide. Fifteen hours and thirty-eight minutes. You have felt his broken nose whistle in his sleep. You have felt his back tell him what a roofing crew's worth of years costs. Nothing in him is wrong enough to run from. It is only that, with the can in your hand, you know that you want a body that does not argue with you, and that you will pay for one. You put the can down. You do not say sorry to him. You never do.

The wheel turns, and the kitchen goes.

Heat comes first, a pan's heat on your face, and a wooden spoon in your right hand, halfway around a circle. The window is full of low gold light. Your arm is stirring, and you stop it. Your weight shifts onto long legs and the floor is much farther away than it was. The ceiling is close. Something is browning in the pan, and your mouth floods with the smell.

Then the shirt. Cotton, thin at the shoulders, soft from washing, and it moves against your back as you breathe, and with it comes a morning. His hands pull it from the drawer, black and a little creased. He is thinking nothing in particular, only that the cargo pants are the clean pair. He steps into them one leg at a time, belt through the loops without looking, and sits on the bed edge to lace the brown boots, the left lace always a little shorter, and he ties them tight because his ankle likes it. He stands and his head almost meets the doorframe, and he ducks it without noticing, a habit older than any of the people in his life.

The spoon handle is warm and worn pale where his thumb sits, and through it comes a night: a sedan, the dash phone glowing, a stranger asleep in the back seat, and him driving slow so as not to wake her. He is tired in a clean way. Under your boots the hardwood gives its small creak by the stove, and he knows that creak, and behind it is a woman laughing at him for knowing it. Two kids on this floor, years back, sliding in socks. A recent ex, a door, a quiet. A girlfriend now, new enough that he buys the good bread. That is what the second plate is for. The thought arrives in his feeling, not yours: a small, nervous hope, a man setting a table he is not sure will be sat at.

You salt the pan and do not taste it. Your hand reaches up and takes down a second plate, and sets it next to the first. His hand knows where the plates live.

Your thumb lifts to your mouth. The nail is already ragged, and you stop. You hold your right hand out in the gold light, turn it over, and look at the palm, the long fingers, a pale callus at the base from a steering wheel. Then you look up at nothing, at the window and the fence, and say out loud, in a voice lower than any you have had:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."

You do not know if you mean him, or the wanting, or yourself.