Darnell Whitmore

You are at the screen, and it is the dull middle of a day with nothing in it. You have been scrolling the way you always scroll, down toward the threads you can recite: the waking-up-as-someone-else stories, the films, the two-in-the-morning posts from strangers who wanted it as much as you. You have wanted it for as long as you can remember, and the wanting has never had anywhere to go. Then a page with a wheel on it. You pay. You do not believe it. You spin.

The arrival is the breath. It goes ragged, then even, and you are the one breathing it. You are face-down in sheets that smell of sleep and cigarettes. Your arm hangs off the mattress, heavy and warm, and the streetlight through the gap in the curtains lies across your closed eyes. There is no travel and no warning. The arm draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at your chest. You do not know that he has never once slept like this.

Then the cloth starts to talk. The black shirt twisted under your ribs gives you a morning: his thumbs hooking the collar, the tiredness of it, the hi-vis hanging on the door and the trench he is already dreading. The jeans still on your legs, stiff at the knees, give you clay. You feel the cold wet weight of the spoil pile, the mini excavator shuddering, and a shovel handle worn smooth where his palm has always gone. Your jaw works at nothing. Something in the body wants a toothpick and wants a cigarette more, a whole pack's worth of wanting sitting in the lungs.

The ring is warm against your sternum, and it opens a kitchen. A woman laughs with her back to you. A small child is on his hip, heavy and sticky and sure of him. Under it runs a quieter ache that is not hers: another woman, a recent one, a phone he keeps turning face-down on the counter. It is his feeling, not yours, and it is shameful and tender and nobody knows about it. The body underneath is twenty-seven. The shoulders are sore from lifting, the back is tight, the thinning crown prickles against the pillow, and the strength in the arms is easy and unasked for. Your palms still know the grip.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. The ring is on the left one. The knuckles are scarred from work, and they are yours now.

"Hi, Darnell," you say, in a voice that is deeper than you expected.

Somewhere a wheel is waiting, and you wonder how long this one lasts: tonight, or four minutes.