Daniel Cheung

You are standing in Andre Whitfield's kitchen in Detroit, and the coffee has gone cold in a mug that is his. His wife's coat is still on the hook by the door. His body is fine. It does everything you ask of it, and you are sick of it by a quarter past six.

Last night you sat at his table with the freckled backs of his hands flat on the wood, and none of it arrived. The pull came in around the third glass of water he'd poured himself, so you didn't pour a fourth. You will not say what you are looking for. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, and Andre's goatee is the last thing you feel.

Cold. Your lungs open wide on it, and breath comes out of you white. Gravel gives under the right shoe, then the left, and the stumble never lands: your weight is already moving and you let it carry. Dawn is pale over a strip of still water. Something small sits in your ear, a thin voice counting, and your wrist buzzes with a split you don't remember holding.

The jacket is slick against your forearms. Your fist closes on nothing and remembers a lighter, the little wheel and the flick of the thumb, and the memory comes up warm and unasked: a porch, a different spring, a woman's laugh, a cigarette he never smoked, only held for the flame. He liked the sound. His thumb is doing it now against the air.

The shoes hit the path in a rhythm that knows itself. Calves, hamstrings, the flat tight bellows of a chest at mile four. This body is thirty-nine and it is fit, though a low ache sits behind the eyes, the way a man's head feels when he drinks like a man with something to put out. You know it without being told. The jacket zip is cold at your throat, and he pulled it up this morning in the dark bedroom, careful of the sleeper, one hand on the pull and one on the dresser. She turned over and said his name, and he said, go back to sleep.

The ring turns on your finger when you swing your arm, a plain band gone smooth. It brings the other one, the first wife, a kitchen with the radio on and a argument neither of them won. He still thinks of her on long runs. He's a decent man about it. Under that is the house, turquoise, the chain-link, the white dust, and the sales calls he can do asleep, the hotel lobbies and the lanyard and the smile he puts on like a clean shirt. At church last Sunday he knelt and could not make the words stay put.

The canal slides alongside. Your hands swing low and loose. You look at them: the left with its band, the right still half-curled around a lighter that isn't there. You turn them over. They are warm and steady, and yours, for now.

"Okay," you say to the empty path, and the voice is lower than you expected. "Okay, Daniel."

The watch buzzes again. You don't know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back.