Declan Francis Moriarty

You are standing at a help desk in Pittsburgh with a headset around your neck, and a woman on line two is telling you for the third time that the printer is plugged in. Kevin's body is patient. It has a patience you did not ask for and cannot use. You say "have you tried turning it off" in his mild voice and feel nothing, and that is the whole reason. The chair is good and the coffee is warm. You are tired of a body that is never hungry for anything. You tell her to hold, and you open the other tab.

The wheel turns. Kevin's hands leave the keyboard and he is gone, a man who lasted less than a minute.

You are lying on your side on a bare mattress on a floor. Foil is taped across the window, and one corner has peeled and put a bar of light across your face. You turned from it, and now you turn back into it. Your eyes are open and you do not blink. The glare is white and you hold it.

You are heavy. It is the first thing the body tells you, a thick warm weight pressed down into the mattress, belly and chest and thighs, a big man's tiredness that sits in the bones. Your mouth tastes of old coffee. Your neck has slept wrong. The eye on the left will not quite sit where you point it, and the room has a slight, patient double edge to it.

Your hand is on your own ribs, and the ring on it is cool. You touch the cotton of the shirt, and the first memory comes up through your fingers.

It is the morning he put these clothes on, except it was evening, the last evening, the light going orange over the triple-decker's porch. The storm door clacked behind him. The trousers were the second pair, because the first pair had split at the seam, and he had stood in the hall laughing at himself while his wife held the new pair out. She said, "Suck in," and he said, "Make me," and she did not make him. She pressed her palm flat on his belly, for luck, the way she did. A small hand. The feeling is not yours. It is plain and it is enormous, a gratitude too ordinary to have a name.

You shift, and the belt shifts, and the leather has a groove worn into it. Under your thumb is the keeper loop, and it gives you the buckle, the drive, the county road. Dusk on a rural road, the cruiser ticking as it cooled. A kid's bike in a ditch with no kid. He had stood over it for a long time with his flashlight, and nobody ever came. He told no one how long. That is the thing he carries, the small bike, and it sits under his sternum like a swallowed stone.

Your free hand finds the pocket and a lighter, a cheap clear plastic one. Your thumb rolls the wheel without being asked. It flips, catches, and flips. The hand knows it perfectly. Smoke comes up with it, the back step on a big night, a beer sweating in his other hand, and the other woman's name, the recent one, the one who still matters. He had not touched her in months. He had typed her a message and not sent it, and he types it again in his sleep, in his thumbs. Under it is a small boy's weight asleep on this same chest, hot breath on the collar, and that one nearly stops you.

You sit up. The mattress sighs. Your boots are on the carpet where he kicked them, and your knees complain. You are twenty-eight and everything works, and everything is a little sore.

You lift your right hand into the stripe of light and turn it over. It is wide and freckled, and the palm is creased and callused at the base of the fingers where a grip lives. The ring sits snug. The lighter is still in it.

You look up, and you say, to nobody, in a voice lower than any you have had:

"Okay. Hi."

Somewhere behind your breastbone the wanting is already stirring, small and patient. You do not know whether you are him by dinner.