Dale Pruitt

Daniel Nguyen's body is standing at a register that isn't open yet, and the keys are already in my hand. The drawer smells of old coins. There is a white streak in the black hair that I keep catching in the dark glass of the door, and for under a minute it has been mine. It is good. The knees don't ache, nobody's hungry, and the street outside is wet and empty before the first bus. I did not spin because he was bad. I spun because I counted the drawer twice and it was right both times, and I felt nothing about it, and I knew where that road went. I pay. The wheel turns.

The mattress edge takes my weight, the springs give, and carpet is under my bare feet. I am half-dressed, mid-reach, a hand lifting toward a button. The light through the blinds is thin and gray. A tie hangs loose around my neck, and my hand finds my own chest and stops flat on it. Ribs. A heart going steady. Under the shirt, on the left side, a small hard ring of metal.

The shirt gives me the first thing. Cotton, thin at the cuffs, a pocket with a ghost of a pen stain. Sleeve by sleeve it comes back, in his feeling: the left arm first, always the left, because the right shoulder complains. He is not going to a shop today. Somebody is burying someone, or somebody is interviewing him, and the good gray shirt has been ironed by a wife who left the board up in the hall. He buttoned it in the dark so as not to wake her. He got one wrong. He felt it and didn't care.

The ring on my finger is warm and loose with sweat. I turn it, and the whole of a kitchen comes up: a woman laughing with her back to me, a pot lid rattling, two kids arguing over a cereal box. A cheap ring, bought when he had nothing, and he has had nothing ever since, and he has never once minded as much as he thought he would.

The carpet under my soles is old and rough, and it carries the burn of a floor in a shop at 2 a.m., sparks dying around his boots, the hiss of a bottle, the helmet's weight coming down on a bald head. His hands know the work. They are scarred pink along the knuckles, thick, patient. They want something to hold. His eye drifts a little outward when he's tired, and I feel it drift now, the room sliding half an inch to the left.

The tie is silk gone shiny at the fold. I draw the wide end up, and my fingers do something without me, a knot he learned from his father in a church hallway. Lap, tuck, pull. It is not a knot I knew. It sits perfect under the beard.

I look at his hands, turning them over. Calloused, steady, the band bright. Then I look up.

"Well," I say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Hello, Dale."

I don't know how long you last. I don't know whether the wanting comes back by noon.