Declan Brophy

You are Owen Margolis, and you have been Owen for less than a minute, standing in a dark apartment in San Francisco with the whole building asleep around you. The floor is cold under his bare feet. His phone is the only light, and it shows the page with the wheel on it. You are not unhappy in him. His body works. His heart is quiet, his knees don't complain, and the beauty mark under his eye is a thing you keep touching in the dark window like a coin. That is the trouble. It all works and none of it is yours, and you already know what it feels like to be handed a thing and find it finished. Nobody sends you back with a reason you could say out loud. You thumb the payment through. The wheel starts to turn, and you let Owen go the way you let go of a rail.

Then you are running.

Cold takes you first, wet cold, in the throat and the teeth. Breath goes out in front of you in a white rag. One foot is in the air and the ground is coming up, and your weight is not where you left it. You stumble for two steps. It never lands, because the body catches itself without being asked, and the other foot goes down and you are running on it. Your arms drop lower. Your head stays still. On the left wrist something buzzes against the bone: a split, a number you have no record of him earning.

Gravel, the canal on your left, black and flat and smoking. Something plays in both ears, a bass line with no song you know in it. His lungs are deep and hot at the bottom and open at the top, mile four of a run he does like a chore he's proud of. The first thing he gives you is the glove. The fleece lining of the right one is against your palm, and the glove is old. He bought them at a drugstore in January, stood at the register counting singles, and put them on in the doorway of his building with the stoop still wet from the night and the street the orange of the sodium lamps. Pleased with himself for the four dollars.

The hoodie comes next, zipped to the throat, the pull of the drawstring against his collarbone. He zipped it in the dark so he wouldn't wake the guy on the other side of the wall. He found it on the chair where he leaves it, with last night's warehouse still in the cuffs: cardboard dust, a smell like a wet dock. Then the memory runs on without you. Six days a week he is at a loading door stacking boxes into a trailer until his shoulders learn the shape of it. You feel that now, in the long muscles of the back, a stored ache like a coin purse of small hurts. Twenty-four years old and he knows precisely what his lower back will say about Thursday. Under that is the good tired of him, the tall strong frame, the thighs that don't quit. The run is how he pays the warehouse back.

There is money in him too, though little: a number in an account that makes him careful in the grocery aisle, the flat feeling of a man who is fine and never more than fine. And there is a habit. Your right hand, loose at the hip, is closing and opening around nothing, a thumb pressing down and letting go. He clicks a pen. He clicks it on the phone, in the truck, at the bar on the one night or two a month when he drinks too much and laughs too loud, dimples cutting deep. He does it now with no pen, and the click is in your thumb before you know it.

The ground goes by. The air smells of leaf rot and cold iron. The watch buzzes again. You take your eyes off the path and lift the hand in front of your face, big-knuckled in the glove, and turn it over.

You pull the glove off with your teeth, and the hand under it is a stranger's, red-knuckled, steaming in the air. You flex it. The canal goes on. Somewhere under the breath you are already listening for the other thing, the small hunger that will wake in this chest and say again.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, to the empty path. "Okay. You're mine. For now."