Declan Furey

The shed smells of latex and old wood smoke, and for a second you're only breath and wanting, close enough to feel the heat off his skin. His eyes are shut. He thinks he knows what's about to happen to him. He's wrong about all of it.

Then it's your mouth, or it becomes yours — the contact makes it yours — and his jaw withdraws out of the frame like a curtain pulled back, and you are standing where he stood, in the shoes he wore, with the whole soft weight of him hanging off your shoulders like a coat that doesn't fit right but will have to do.

You open his eyes slowly, the way you've watched him do a hundred times without knowing you were rehearsing it. The window throws its stripe of morning across the pots and the ladder and the sacks of something drying in the corner. You lift two fingers to your mouth and touch it, tasting whose it was. You know exactly whose. That's the whole reason you're here.

Declan. Fifty years old, built like a man who used to be strong and let it go soft and comfortable, the belly pushing out over his belt, the freckles scattered thick across his nose like he'd walked through a fine rain of them once and never washed it off. You've catalogued this body from a distance for longer than you'd admit — across a counter of trays, across a clearing, across every place your paths crossed and hers stood between you.

Because that's what this was always about. Her.

You feel it settle into you the way his memories do — not as pictures but as weight, as the particular ache in his lower back from bending over the saw table, as the itch of latex dust that never fully leaves his forearms even in the off season. He has three children who call him at strange hours about school and money and one who doesn't call at all anymore, not since the divorce that wasn't quite a divorce because he was never married to their mother, just tangled with her for a decade before he came out here, before the rubber trees, before the woman he lives with now who still keeps a photograph of someone else's wedding ring in a drawer she thinks he doesn't know about.

And before all of that — before the girlfriend, before the kids, before any of it — there was the one who mattered. The one whose jaw was at the edge of your vision a moment ago, whose mouth is still faintly on his mouth, whose leaving him for you, or almost you, or the idea of you, is the wound this whole body was built around.

You walk him out into the plantation path, the latex cups ticking faintly as sap finds its way down into them, the green so deep and wet it looks blue in the shade. His feet know this ground without you asking them to. His hands know how to reach out and touch the bark absently, checking a cut, checking a flow, the habit of thirty years of mornings.

You could stay in that habit. You could let his body run itself down into evening, feeding animals, counting trays, saying nothing you didn't have to.

But you go instead to find her — the one who was just here, whose jaw is gone from the frame but whose shape you remember from every argument, every celebration, every year the two of you circled each other around this same aging, freckled, big-bellied man like dogs around a bone neither of you would put down.

You find her by the well, wringing a cloth, not looking up.

"You're back," she says, not meaning you. Meaning him. Meaning the man whose mouth you're wearing.

"I'm back," you say, and it comes out low, thick with his voice, freckled hands opening at your sides like his always did when he didn't know what else to offer.

She looks up. Something in her face tells you she can't see the difference. Nobody ever can. That's the cruelty of it — you get the victory and no one to hand it to.

You stay through the afternoon inside him, doing the small physical business of his life: hauling a bucket, wiping his face with his forearm, feeling the give of his own belly when he sits too fast on the bench outside his door, feeling how tired his knees are from decades of standing at a counter with a saw gone quiet in his hand more often than not these days, business slower, cuts thinner, three mouths and a fourth to feed even when the shop's not busy.

At dusk his girlfriend brings him dal and rice and sits close enough that her shoulder touches his arm, and something in his chest — your chest, for now — eases at the touch in a way that has nothing to do with the woman by the well or the years behind him. You feel, distinctly and against your will, how much he loves this quieter thing he built after all the noise.

It needles you more than winning would have.

He eats slow. He rubs his own scalp once, the old habit of a man remembering hair that isn't there anymore. He laughs at something one of the smaller children says, a boy with his mother's eyes, and the sound comes up out of his chest like it's always lived there, and you let it come because there's no reason not to.

Later, in the dark, lying beside her, his eyes grow heavy the plain animal way eyes do at the end of a long day of trees and blood and old grief finally put down.

You feel him going.

You touch his mouth once more with two fingers, checking, as if the taste might still be there to steal twice.

It isn't.

He sleeps, and you go with the sleep, and somewhere behind you, in a body that is entirely and only his again, Declan Furey turns over, and doesn't dream of you at all.