Daniel Kenji Hayashida

You are in the pastor's body, in the pastor's kitchen, before the day has started. You have been him for three minutes. The kettle has not boiled. Your thumb keeps finding the bridge of his nose, the old break, a small bend in the bone, and you press it as if it might tell you something.

It doesn't. He was kind, probably. His whole house smells of coffee and floor wax and a sermon half-written on the table. You read two lines of it. They were good lines, and they were about a mercy you have no use for. That is why you pay for the wheel again. Not because he can't do anything. He could, and that's the trouble: all that care laid out ready, and you standing in it like a coat on a hook. You wanted a man who is mid-sentence in his own life. You tell yourself it is only curiosity. The kettle starts to tick as it warms.

You spin, and there is no travel.

You are at the foot of a bed with your hand rising toward your collar. Your breath is already in the middle of itself, and your weight settles back on the heels of two socked feet. The button under your fingers is wrong by one. The tie hangs loose and cool on either side of your neck. You lay your palm flat on your chest and feel ribs under a soft, heavy layer, and a heartbeat that is not yours yet. Light from the window is on the wall. Steam from the wet street has fogged the lower pane.

The shirt is the first thing that gives. Its cotton lies against your back, slightly damp from the air, and you feel him buy it: a department store, a Saturday, his girlfriend holding two shirts against his chest and saying the white one, always the white one. Her laugh comes up in him warm and a little tired. Then the cuffs, and the left cuff has a thread loose that he has meant to cut for a month. Your fingers go to it on their own. They can't stand still. They tap the seam of the trousers, the button, the tie, restless as a pulse.

The tie slides through your fingers, and now it is an afternoon. A school hallway, a small child's drawing taped to a locker, a boy of seven and a girl of four in the back seat, arguing about a song. He loves them in a way that has no edges. Under it, a lower note: the recent ex, a woman's voice in a different kitchen saying she is not angry, only done. He still reaches for his phone to tell her things. You feel the reach in your arm like a phantom.

The floor is old wood, and through his socks you feel the grain, the one board by the door that gives. That is the shotgun house, one room opening into the next. You see the long hall from the inside, the front door, the porch where he drinks one beer, then another, watching the street steam after rain. Not sad. Just an evening he doesn't want to end quickly.

His back aches at the base, the dull ache of thirty-three years and a desk chair. His knees are sound. His stomach is soft over the belt, and he is not ashamed of it. Your shoulders are broad, and his hands are strong from handling boxes and clipboards and the rail of a mezzanine above a floor of forklifts. The memory of that rail is cold and smooth, and he stands there each morning counting trucks, feeling that if he watches closely enough, nothing will go wrong.

Then the button. Your fingers undo it, and they know the way back up, one through each hole, and the tie goes around and over with a knot he has never tied. It is yours. It is neat, a little arrogant. The closet has never seen it.

You hold your hand out in front of you and turn it over. Broad palm, a callus at the base of the fingers, a faint crease where a pen rests. Not yours. Then you look up at the window, then past it.

"Well," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, and easy. "Hello, Daniel."

The street steams. Somewhere a truck is already waiting. You wonder how long this one lasts, and when the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.