Daniel Kahananui

Marcus Tillery's gold tooth is still against your tongue when you decide. It is the middle of a Tuesday in Nashville, the site humming on a screen. Below you a crew is pouring a slab, and a man calls you foreman. Fifty years of knees, and a beard you have learned to rub when you think. The body works. It was never the body.

Something he said at lunch, laughing, to a stranger, in a voice you did not choose: *I've never once wanted to be anywhere else.* You tried the sentence in his mouth and it would not fit. So you pay. The wheel turns. Marcus goes out of you like a held breath.

Then a sidewalk, and the air is wet and cool, a dawn that has not made up its mind. Your arm is out in front of you, ending in a plastic handle. The leash has gone slack. At the end of it a small gray-and-tan dog stands at a hibiscus hedge, and she has looked up at you with her ears flat back, because something about you has changed and she can tell.

You wind the cord twice around your hand. You start walking, and she has to learn your stride.

The handle is warm and slightly tacky from his grip, and it gives you the first thing. A kitchen at the very end of a night, steel gone dull under the lights, a hundred tickets spiked and dying on the rail. His voice, hoarse from calling *fire, two salmon, hands, hands.* Pride sits in his chest like a hot coal. Under it is a tired, steady fear about money: the walk-in is failing, and the owner will not say so.

The flannel is soft and old, washed gray, and its cuffs brush your wrists. Sleeve by sleeve it hands you this morning. He stood in a dark bedroom so as not to wake her. The girlfriend turned in the sheets and said his name into the pillow. He buttoned the flannel wrong and fixed it. He pulled the green shirt over the ink at his collarbone, fine lines, a triangle inside a triangle. His grandmother's pattern, redrawn by someone who loved geometry. He touched it through the cotton, as he does every morning, like checking a pocket.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. His shoes are brown and worn at the heel, and they remember a run to the school bus. Two children, a boy and a girl, shouting. The thin gold-lit ache of an ex-girlfriend, recent, someone he still reaches for in his head at night. He keeps that quiet, with the second drink. You find the vape in a pocket, cool and slim, and a craving rises in your throat and goes through you without asking. Beneath it is a Friday candle, a grandmother's Hebrew said badly, shame and comfort mixed.

His body is small and dense. Five-five, with a cook's low balance. The lower back aches. The feet are tired before the day starts. The air moves over the high bare corners of the hairline, and your jaw is smooth, shaved an hour ago, and the cleft in your chin catches the cool.

You stop. You lift your free hand and turn it over. It is square, scarred across the knuckles with old burns. It knows how to hold a knife. Then you look up, and the dog is watching you.

"Okay," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected. "Okay, Daniel. Let's see."

The leash hums against your palm. You do not know how long, whether this is the one, or when the wanting comes back.