Curtis Whitmore

You are standing in Ruben's kitchen with the coffee going cold in his hand, and you have been him for less than a minute. His apartment is quiet. The refrigerator hums a note you can't stop hearing. You wanted a body that worked, and this one works. What sent you back is small. Ten minutes ago you were Warren Takeda on a porch in Kentucky, and a man called you by a name that was not yours, said it warmly, and you answered to it like a dog. Now you are a bald man in New York with green eyes and dimples, a stranger's idea of a pleasant face. You put the cup down. The wheel is already open on the phone, and the word is already paid for.

The rain arrives before the rest. It is cold on your face, it runs into your open collar, and you are standing in it with your hood shoved back. There was a shelter a step behind you, and the light from it is on your shoulders. Water comes off your chin. Your lungs go wide, wider than Ruben's did. You are slower and heavier, and you stand like a man who has leaned on his own weight for sixty-three years.

The jacket comes first. Its nylon is slick under your thumb, and the cuff is elastic and worn. You pulled this on in a hallway, one arm and then the other, while a woman said *take the umbrella* and you said *it's three minutes, Dee*. The zipper catches halfway, as it always does. Your hand knows to lift it and jiggle it, and you feel her laugh in your chest like a warm stone.

Your right hand is in the pocket, and something small and metal is there. It is a lighter with a worn wheel. You never smoked. Your father did, on a porch in Fillmore, and you took the lighter off the table the week of the funeral. You flip it open and shut all day without knowing. The click goes through you. A coffin, a church fan, a hymn you can sing without the words.

Your left hand holds nothing. The band on it is thin and loose from years of soap, and it turns easily. The knuckle remembers the day it went on. You were thirty-one and sweating through a rented jacket, and she was crying and laughing at once.

Your nose aches in the cold. A broken nose, set crooked. A basketball elbow, 1983, the gym floor coming up fast, and a boy named Terrell who apologized for forty years. You breathe through it and it whistles faintly.

Your knees are old and your back is stiff, but your feet are sure. The sneakers are soaked and the wet has reached your socks. You don't mind it. You have waited for this bus in dry weather for years, and some part of you stepped out into the water on purpose, a beat early, just to feel it. You have not been cold in a long time.

You lift your hand out of the rain and turn it over. It is broad, brown, and creased, with a ring and a lighter's callus on the thumb. Water pools in the palm. You look up.

"Well," you say, to the street, to the light. "Hello, Curtis."

The bus is coming. You don't know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting will come back.