Dennis Kilcoyne

You are standing in Calvin Wong's kitchen at the sink, and the water is running over a cup that is already clean. Two minutes. That is how long you have been him. The bus keys are still on the hook by the door, and his knees are fine. His back is fine. He has a daughter asleep down the hall and a thermostat set to sixty-six, and you have already opened the page on his phone with his thumb.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the part you would not say out loud. You came into him and the first thing you did was stand in the dark and listen to the house, and it was kind, and it was entirely somebody else's. Every room asked you something. You pressed the card on the screen and the wheel began to turn.

Now you are kneeling.

The floor takes your weight at the edge of a bed. Cotton is under your forearms, cool and a little rough. The air is a warm lamp, a dry radiator, and somewhere a vape's sweet chemical ghost. You are halfway through standing, laughing at something, breath caught mid-laugh. The smile slides off. You go down onto both knees, and your forehead lands on the bedspread.

Then the shirt gives you the morning. Gray cotton, thin at the collar, soft from a hundred washes. It is not this one he wore today. It is the one he sleeps in, and still your shoulders remember pulling it over a head with no hair to catch. A hand smooths the collar flat against the tattoo, the black barbed ink he got at nineteen and never regretted and never explained. A wife's voice, half asleep: *you're up again.* He said, *just checking the clock.* He was not. He was praying badly, the way he does, with one eye open and no real words, a man who believes in something and could not tell you what.

The bedspread. Under your palms it is the quilt his mother-in-law gave them, and you get a whole afternoon from it, a Sunday, the kids on this bed with a bowl of popcorn between them, his daughter's feet in his lap. He was so tired and so happy he felt guilty. Then another bed, a different one, years back, an ex-wife's, a fight about money that ended with him sitting on the floor of a hallway. He still sends her a text every birthday. His wife knows. It is fine. It is mostly fine.

The wedding band is warm against your finger. You turn it with your thumb and a trench opens in you, cold clay, the mini excavator ticking as it idles, a toothpick going soft in his teeth. Your jaw is already working at nothing. His hands want that toothpick the way a tongue wants a gap. Ten hours of shovel have settled into your forearms, a good heavy ache. Your thighs are tight from the kneeling. The knuckles hurt where they hurt every night. The earlobes carry two small studs you can feel when you turn your head.

You lift your face. The clock says 2:37 in red. The window is black, and in it a bald man with a heavy dark brow is looking back at you, blue eyes wide.

You raise your hand and turn it over. It is broad, scarred across the palm, the ring catching the lamp. Yours. Not yours. Yours until it is not.

"Hey, Dennis," you say, quietly, to the glass.

And under it, already, the old small question, leaning in the way it always does: how long does this one hold, and when does the wanting come back.