Dale Pruitt

You have been Peter Skoglund for thirty-one minutes, and already you know it was a mistake — not the wanting, the *choosing*. The gap in his front teeth catches your tongue every time you talk. His hands are soft in a way that irritates you, a surgeon's hands that have never done a single day of anything but careful work, and the apartment around you smells like eucalyptus diffuser and money, and none of it is interesting. You spun for a surgeon because you thought competence would feel like something. It doesn't. It feels like being early for an appointment that never comes. Thirty-one minutes of standing in his kitchen not knowing what you were going to do with him, and that not-knowing is the itch, the same itch it always is, the thing that has eaten three hundred and fifty men before him. You open the laptop still open on his counter. The site loads the way it always loads, patient, gray, a wheel drawn plain as a clock with no numbers on it. You do not think about who you are leaving slack-jawed at his own counter. You never do. You pay. You spin.

The wheel is still turning somewhere behind your eyes when the cold hits — real cold, dawn cold, a wet band of it across the chest — and your foot is already coming down wrong, weight going somewhere your balance doesn't expect, and for two strides you are not attached to the ground at all. Then you are. The stumble never lands. The legs correct themselves on muscle that isn't new to this even if you are, and you are running, mid-stride, arms low, breath sawing white in front of a face you don't own yet, and a watch on the wrist buzzes once, cheerfully, announcing a split time to a man who has no memory of holding it.

The canal is black glass on your left. The sky over it is doing the thing it does before it commits to morning, orange bleeding thin along one edge like a wound that hasn't decided to be a wound yet. Earbuds feed you a voice mid-sentence, some podcast about nothing, and you let it run because turning it off is a decision and you are still arriving.

The jacket is what gets you first — not sight, touch, the cheap-soft interior lining of it dragging against forearms that have gone cold at the wrist and warm everywhere the effort's reached. A flash: this same jacket, zipper stuck at the collarbone, a woman's hands finishing what his hands couldn't be bothered to, laughing at him, *you'd run in a garbage bag if I let you*. Christine. Not the girlfriend. The other one. The one whose name isn't on his arm.

The shirt against your back, damp already, unspools a morning — not this morning, all mornings, the sameness of them: alarm at four-forty, the fridge light too bright, coffee he doesn't wait for, the sweatshirt off the same hook by the same door every day of his life, sleeve, sleeve, zipper, the little tug at the hem to seat it right, done a thousand times without once being looked at while it happened. His body knows this shirt the way it knows how to breathe. There's no pride in the memory and no shame either, just repetition worn smooth, the comfort of a thing that doesn't require him to be anybody in particular yet.

The shorts, the shoes — cheap tightness at the laces where he's tied them exactly the same too-tight since high school track, a coach's voice buried under twenty-five years of other voices, *lace 'em like you mean it, Pruitt* — and then the mole. You feel it before you place it, a small dense patch of skin high on the cheek that his own fingers have touched ten thousand times without thinking, checking it the way some men check a wallet's still in the pocket. A girl in seventh grade called it a beauty mark to be kind and he never told anyone that he liked that she'd said it.

The tattoos come up through the arm's own memory of the needle, not pain exactly, more like weight: *Sarah, 1979* — his mother, dead eleven years now, the date not her birth but the year she taught him to cast a fishing line off the dock behind a house that isn't standing anymore — and under it a compass, done the week his daughter was born, because he'd read somewhere that a man should have direction and didn't yet, and thought the ink might loan him some. Her name isn't on him. He'd wanted it there. The tattoo guy talked him out of it — *do it in five years when you're sure it's still true* — and he never went back, and that not-going-back sits in the chest like a splinter that healed in wrong.

The girlfriend's name comes up soft and recent, a text thread half-remembered, her laugh at something dumb he said in the studio parking lot last week. The one who got away comes up sharper, the way old things always cut cleaner than new ones — a wedding that didn't happen, a reason that was his fault and that he has forgiven himself for on nine separate anniversaries and meant it maybe four of those times.

The leg. You feel it now that you're not moving it for running — the idle tremor it wants to fall into, an old tell, church pew as a boy, waiting rooms, folding tables at the studio between setups where a man his age stands around half-dressed under lights waiting to be told his face is needed again, bouncing the leg because thinking is a thing that wants somewhere to go.

The watch buzzes again, a small officious mercy, and the podcast keeps talking into an ear that no longer belongs to the man who put the earbuds in.

You stop running. It isn't a decision so much as a lack of one — the legs simply quit asking permission — and you stand on the gravel with the canal breathing fog beside you and lift both hands up in front of your face like you're checking they came with you.

They did. Older than yours were, a mole riding high on a cheek you can't see but can feel, a compass inked into a forearm pointing at nothing in particular.

You turn the hand over once, slow, watching the tendons move like you're the one who put them there.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty towpath and the dark water and nobody. "Okay. Let's see who you are."