Daniel Hyun Park

You are standing in a dead man's kitchen in Phoenix, and the refrigerator is humming the same note it has hummed for three minutes. Dale Hutchins has a bad left knee. You found that out reaching for a glass, and the knee has not stopped talking since. The goatee itches. The cable-company polo is on the chair, folded the way his hands folded it, and you do not know whose habit that was.

Nothing is wrong with him. He works. He has a van, a route, a ladder you could climb in your sleep, and it is the middle of the night with the whole street dark. What sent you back to the page was smaller than a fault. In three minutes you have opened his phone twice, and both times it showed nothing you wanted. Nobody has called him in a long while. You wanted a man with a reason to be awake, and you are tired of being handed men who go quietly to sleep. So you sit in his chair, thumb the wheel, and pay.

The floor is gone. The knee is gone.

You are on both knees on a wooden floor, halfway up from a crouch, with a laugh still in your chest that is not yours. Then your weight comes down, and your forehead meets cloth. A bedspread, rough, smelling of dust and detergent. The breath you were mid-way through finishes without you.

Cotton is sticking to your back. The t-shirt, soft and gone thin at the collar, and with it comes a morning: his thumb hooking the hem at the dryer, the shirt still warm, a long day coming and him not minding. Sleeves next. The same hands buttoning a plaid flannel over it, one cuff, then the other, rolled twice, the way his father did it, and his father's rolled cuffs come with a smell of cut pine and a radio playing in a truck.

The jeans have sawdust worked into the knees. Under them the floor is cold, and it is the floor of a house with a gravel road outside. Gravel, barbed wire, a water tower blinking red on the horizon. He drives toward it every morning.

Your hands are on the bedspread. They are broad and square, the knuckles scarred pale. Your thumb finds the nail-gun trigger in the air and presses it. A slab, a wall half-framed, the hose coiled at his boots, the whole body knowing the recoil before it comes. Your shoulders are heavy and good. Your thighs are tight from kneeling. There is a ring through your lip, a cold little bead against the gum, and you worry it with your tongue and get a sudden, clear picture of a woman laughing at him for doing exactly that. Then the picture is gone, and what is left is an ache with no name on it. She got away. He still checks his phone for her.

The keys on the nightstand are a jingle you could hear from here. His mother's rosary hangs on the lamp. He was praying badly, grinning at himself, and he said amen early because he was embarrassed to be so tired and so sincere at once.

Your forearm is under your cheek, and the portrait on it is warm against your face. You know the face in it without being told, and you do not say her name.

You lift your head. Slowly, you turn your hand over. The palm is hard and strange and yours. You look up into the dark glass of the window, at a man with a mole high on his cheek, and you say, low, "Okay. Hello."

The clock says it is the middle of the night. You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether you will feel the wanting come back before the sun does.