Daniel Rourke

You are standing in Travis Holloway's chest, and it is the middle of a Tuesday, and the ceiling fan over the mat is ticking. Eleven kids' worth of shouting has left a ringing in his ears. You had a body that worked. His shoulders were quick, his knees held a bridge, and still you sat on the edge of the folding chair with the page open, because a boy had cried on the mat that morning and Travis's hands had not known what to do with it. Your hands. His hands. They hovered and let it pass, and something in you went flat and wanted out. The wheel turns. Travis stops at the exact center of a thought.

Now there is a fork. It is in the air, halfway to your mouth, with rice on it, and the coat is heavy on your shoulders, a long padded weight, zipped to the breastbone. The room is cold and small and lit from above by one warm lamp. Your jaw is already opening. Somewhere out the dark window a vending machine hums.

You close your mouth on the rice. Salt, ginger, something burnt and sweet. The container is balanced on a counter edge worn smooth, and the metal of the fork is warm from his grip.

The coat comes first. The fabric under your fingers is slick and cold, and the zipper pull is the first key. A morning at a station, a gray platform, wind through the gap in the collar, and him tugging it up to his chin with a dull feeling like being tired on purpose. He bought it after the layoff, on sale, and told himself it was sensible. The sleeves are a little long. The feeling is shame so old it has become habit.

The counter edge against your hip: a kitchen at another hour, a woman's laugh he has since stopped replaying, a plate set down too hard. It is gone before you can name her. Then the floor, cold wood through thin socks, and a quiet lane at night, and a pouch of nicotine tucked under his lip in the dark, the small burn of it, and a promise beside it. No drink. Four years of no drink. The promise is a hard clean thing he carries like a stone in the pocket, and it is the proudest he has ever been of anything.

The fork in your fingers: his thumb knows exactly where to sit. Your free hand drifts up and touches your face, the beard, the mole under the eye, a gesture he makes ten thousand times without noticing. The beard is stiff and neat. You feel the trim of it from this morning, the small scissors, the mirror, the gray looking back, and the thought that he looks like someone who should have a place to be.

The body underneath is strong and tired. The shoulders are wide with old work. A dull ache sits at the base of the spine. His stomach is hungry in the plain way of a man who forgot to eat until now.

You set the fork down on the counter. You shrug the coat off and let it hang from the chair back, and you sit, and eat, and the dark window gives you back his face.

You lift your hand. Turn it over. The palm is rough, the knuckles wide, a stranger's life in the creases.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than yours. "Okay. You'll do."

And under it, already, the small quiet question: how long.