Daniel Seo

Colm Ferris has a farmhand's back, and by ten in the morning it is already wrong. I stand in a row of irrigated cotton with the sun pressing on my neck, and I have been him for less than a minute by the clock of the world, though it feels like longer. The shoulders are narrow. The ground is too close. His moustache tickles when I breathe out. I wanted to be taller than this. That is all it is, and I would not say it to anyone: I put a hoe down in the dirt and I was already reaching for the page.

Then the wheel, and no travel.

The hold music loops back to its first bar. My shoulder drops the phone into my hand mid-loop. The pen stops on the second digit and does not start again, and the envelope is under my fingers, a reference number half circled in blue.

Everything is higher. The counter meets me at the hip instead of the ribs. The window throws white light across herbs in clay pots, and the tile is cool through the soles of his shoes. Someone is breathing in my chest with long lungs, and it is me.

The shirt comes first. Flannel, soft from washing, the cuff rolled twice. My thumb finds the loose button on it and he is there. He stood at the foot of a bed this morning with the shirt half on, deciding between this one and a cleaner one, because the call was about money and he wanted to feel like a man who could be taken seriously. He did the buttons wrong, one off, and fixed it with a muttered word, and then rolled the sleeves to hide the cuff that had frayed. The denim at my thighs was a gift. His mother mailed it, and he never told her it was too long for him until he hemmed it himself, badly, with a stapler. I feel the staples against my ankle. It makes me nearly laugh.

The pen is warm. His hand knows how to hold it, a stubborn grip, pressed hard enough to dent the page beneath. He has been circling this number for eleven minutes. The fear in it is not mine: a bill, a dropped class, the word hold repeated until it sounds like a verdict. Under the fear is something quieter. His knuckles want to crack, and I let them. The sound runs up my forearm like a small door opening.

The sleeve slides and the ink shows. Script, a name, a date. I press my thumb on the letters and the memory tears open. It is a needle in an overheated shop in Koreatown, his jaw clenched, a friend laughing at him, and he cries a little, not from pain. Min-ho. He was a brother or a boyfriend or a grief, and I cannot tell which, only that the date is a day he decided not to forget. The same hand, later, still sore, held a different hand across a table. A recent ex, the name of him arriving without a face: the last time the two of them argued over rent and pride in this kitchen, the dish rack stacked wet between them. The thyme on the sill was his. He talks to it when no one is home.

My back aches strangely, the backpack-carrying ache of twenty years and a hundred lectures. His feet are big and certain. His beard is thick under my knuckle, an inch past the jaw, and his bangs, cut blunt and dyed deep red, brush my brow. A prayer comes up from nowhere, short, from a childhood pew. Lord, just let it be enough. He never said it aloud this morning. He thought it.

The hold music loops again.

I lift my hand from the envelope and turn it over, palm to ceiling, the freckled back of the wrist, the letters crawling under the cuff. These are long fingers. They shake a little. Then I raise my eyes into the lens, and my voice, which is deeper than the last one, comes out low.

"Still here," I say, and I wonder how long.