Dale Switzer

The man you are wearing has a knee that clicks when he stands, and you stand anyway, in the El Paso evening, with the desk lamp still on and a spreadsheet he never finished open on the screen. Sixty-three years in him, one minute of it yours. His belly presses the table edge. His beard itches at the collar. His reading glasses are pushed up into silver hair. You have been an engineering manager for sixty seconds and already you know the thing he cannot do: he cannot stop being tired. It lives in his shoulders like a tenant. You wanted a man who did not have to try to be someone, and this one has been trying since before you got here. Down the hall a woman is saying his name, softly, to ask if he is eating. You do not know her name. You do not answer. You open the page, the wheel is already turning, and the beard and the belly and the tenant all go quiet at once.

Then a stove ring ticks and a blue flame hisses, and you are standing in the middle of a circle you did not start. The wooden spoon is in your right hand, mid-stir, and the weight of the pan is in your wrist. The stirring stops. You start it again the other way, because your arm wants the other way. The light through the window is yellow and low, and across the field behind the houses a thunderhead is stacking black. You are light. After the other man you are almost nothing, narrow and quick, and one leg is already bouncing against the cabinet without being asked.

You reach for the salt and shake it over the pan. You do not taste it. His hand knows not to.

The shirt is the first thing that talks. It is soft and thin at the collar, a gray T-shirt washed past its color, and the cloth against your shoulder blades gives you a morning: his arms going up through it in the dark, the bedroom cold, a pocketknife hunted from the dresser because he always forgets it, the hum of a phone charging. He pulls on the work pants and the hi-vis vest by the door later, but this shirt goes on first, under everything, because it is the one he sleeps in and keeps for Sundays. He feels something about that. Not much. A small private thing, almost faith.

The jeans come next, stiff at the knee. A flash: a hardware aisle, a woman's laugh, his own voice asking whether she wants the green or the gray. Her name rises with the warmth of it. Dana. Girlfriend. He has not told her he is afraid of this being good.

The spoon handle is smooth and dented by his thumb. Under it comes the ex-wife, a kitchen in a different house, a sound of a door, a year that ended with both of them politely tired. He still keeps her birthday in his phone. He still prays for her, badly, standing up. The faith is a floor he does not think about, load-bearing and plain.

The pan gives you the smell of onion and butter, and under it the smell he gave up: a gas-station lot at four a.m., the first drag, the cold. Eleven years quit. Your lungs remember wanting it. No drink in this house, never; the fridge hums with soda and leftovers.

The counter edge is hard against your hip. Your feet know the linoleum. Calluses on the fingers, a warehouse pick-gun grip worn into the palm, the beep of forklifts in aisles of racking that follow him even here. His back aches in one low place. You stand straight anyway. The knee bounces.

You take down a second plate, because that is what his hand is already doing, and you set it beside the first. You do not know why. You stand looking at the two plates in the yellow light, and something that is his, not yours, stays warm in your chest for a second before it fades.

Then you look at your hands. Freckled across the backs, narrow, quick, the knuckles chapped. You turn them over. Nothing about them is tired.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, where a thin man with a high bare forehead looks back, and you say, quietly, "Hello, you."

The first flame ticks under the pan. You wonder how long you get, and whether the wanting will come back by morning, or in four minutes.