Dale Ryan Kowalczyk

You are standing in Tanner Whitaker's kitchen in Ohio, and the refrigerator is the only thing awake.

He has been yours for a minute. Six feet of him, the shoulders that keep wanting to be used, the blond stubble you rubbed against your palm in the bathroom mirror. A good body. A body that works. You ran the tap and drank from your hand and felt the water go down a throat that had never once been tired. Nothing is wrong with him.

That is almost the trouble. On the counter his phone lights with a text from a girl named Brooke, and you do not know who she is, and you do not want to. Everything in this house has a name on it that you would have to be taught. The wanting came back anyway, the way it does, a cold coin under the tongue. Tonight you did not even wait to be bored.

You sit at the laptop. The wheel is already turning when you wake the screen, as if it had been spinning the whole time without you. You pay. You press.

Then you are lying on your face, and the dark is wet with your own breath.

The breath is ragged, a snore catching on something. Your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone hot and damp. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it; the fingers are thick and tingling, the knuckles brushing a cord on the carpet. Light comes through a gap in the curtains, orange, from a street lamp. A train goes by overhead, close enough to feel in the frame of the bed, and the glass hums.

You breathe in once, and the ragged thing in the chest smooths. You draw the arm up. It comes heavy, the shoulder complaining. You roll onto your back and the springs speak. Your hands fold on your chest, one over the other, tidy as a body laid out. He has never slept like this. You can tell by how the body objects, a small wrongness in the ribs.

The sheet is under your fingers, and something opens.

Cold, a stairwell, a hand-rail of painted steel. Boots on it, a crowd of boys in a line, and a voice he obeys without thinking. He is nineteen and proud, and the pride has a smell, gun oil and wet canvas. The sleeve of the right arm tingles. The insignia is there under the cotton, and he feels it the way you feel a name you were given. He does not tell people what it cost. You do not find out what it cost. You only get the pride, and under it a flat gray place he walks around.

Your left thumb moves and finds the ring. Plain, warm, a little loose in winter. Her voice comes, low, in a kitchen: *you smell like floor wax, you beautiful idiot.* Her laugh. The pleasure of it is so large and so quiet that your eyes sting. Then the debt: a number on a letter, and him sitting in the truck outside the building with the engine off so she would not hear him breathe. Underwater, always a little. He does the sum every night like a rosary, though he believes in nothing.

The shirt is on the floor, but the long-sleeved thing he wears now has a cuff, and you pull it with your fingers. This morning, the morning of his last shift: he drew the gray work shirt over his head, one arm and then the other, the sleeve catching on the old insignia. He fed the buttons up from the belly, slow, and clipped the key ring to the belt loop, the carabiner snapping shut with a small bright sound he likes. Boots next. He kneels, laces them hard, and the left knee pops. He is forty-one, and the knee tells him so.

The corridor comes up behind it: a school after the last bell, floors like lakes, the mop wringer's squeal. He likes it empty. A child's drawing taped crooked, and he straightens it each night and tells nobody. Out on the back step he vapes, the sweet fog hanging in the cold, and a pen clicks in his fingers, click, click, though there is no paper anywhere.

And then the other one, small and sideways. A woman from before the wife, a girl on a porch in a yellow coat. He thinks of her once a month and means nothing by it. It is the only thing in him that is only his, and you hold it like a coal and put it down.

The body underneath all this is compact, five foot four of knotted use. The forearms are hard from wringing and lifting. The back aches low and honest. The scalp is cool where the hair has gone, and the long hair at the sides lies against your neck. The beard is a neat rough line along the jaw. Your breath tastes of sleep and mint.

You lift your right hand into the orange light. You turn it over. The knuckles are scarred pale, the nails clean and short, the ring on the other hand a dull gold gleam. Your fingers want to click a pen. You let them.

Then you look up, at nothing, at the ceiling and the passing train's shaking glow, and you say it softly, because somewhere down the hall a woman is sleeping.

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

You do not know if it is him you mean.