Darius Colbert

You are leaving Paul Wozniak, and you are leaving him in under a minute. He is five-foot-four and the world is pitched at the wrong height for him. The counter at the break room is at his ribs. The security desk camera looks down on him. He has a flashlight that weighs more than it should and a belt that sits on a gut he never earned. Nothing is wrong with him, and that is the trouble. You have been Paul for less than a minute and already you know his whole range: a short man's lunge for a shelf, a short man's patience with doors. You wanted to see over something. So you click the page, and the wheel turns, bright and stupid, and you pay again.

It lands. You are standing.

A steel railing is under your forearm and a clipboard is under your left hand. The pen is in your right, mid-stroke on a tally. The air is dry, warm and dusty, with cardboard and diesel and hot concrete in it, and below you the floor roars with scanners and forklifts and a dozen men moving in loops. You are tall. You are looking down on all of it. Your first stroke is wrong, a seven with a tail on it, so you do it again slowly, and the next ten are checked, one by one, as if somebody had never trusted this count.

Then the clipboard gives you something. The board is warm where his thumb rides it, and the grip arrives in your hand: Marisol's pen, no, a gift pen, a cheap one from his daughter, who is seven and drew a lopsided truck on the cap in marker. He keeps it clipped on and nobody is allowed to borrow it. The feeling is pride with an ache in it, hot behind the sternum.

The sweater comes next, the charcoal quarter-zip against your neck. His fingers know the zipper's tooth. This morning he stood in a stucco courtyard with the palms rattling, the girlfriend's laugh coming through the wall, and pulled it on over the checked shirt because the mezzanine is cold before noon. He stood at the mirror and tugged the collar up over the wine-dark mark along his jaw. He has never hidden it. He tugs the collar because his mother used to, and he is tender about that.

Your jaw works on something thin and wooden, a toothpick, flattened at the end by his molars. The taste is pine and nine thousand worried hours. Behind it comes a cigar on a back step, a Sunday after church, forty days sober and still wanting the glass in his hand, the smoke being the deal he made. You feel the whole bargain, quiet and stubborn.

The belly presses the rail. The knees are thirty-eight years old and say so. The shoulders are broad and unhurried. The boots are brown leather, resoled twice, heavy as promises, and under them the diamond-plate gives a faint ring. The badge swings against your thigh, and his own face looks up from it, younger and nervous on the first day.

You lift your right hand off the board. Calloused at the pad, ink on the side of the finger. You turn it over. It is steady. It is somebody's, and now it is yours.

You look up, toward nothing, toward the floor and the light in the high windows, and you say, low, "Okay, Darius. Let's see you."

Somewhere under the noise the wanting is already stirring, small as a toothpick, and you do not know whether it will be the afternoon, or the week, or the next breath.