Dennis Kowalczyk

Craig Lindqvist's feet are cold on the boat deck, and that is the whole reason you are leaving him.

He has been Craig for less than a minute. The cleft in his chin still feels like a thumbprint someone left there. You are standing in a dark kitchen in the Sunset, wearing a fishing guide's good shoulders, and the house is asleep around you. Tuesday has turned into the part of the night that belongs to nobody. His rods lean in the corner. His daughter's drawings are on the fridge, and she is not yours. You opened the cupboard and found his coffee, his careful life, everything arranged so a man could be content. You were not. You cannot say why, not even here, not even to the tide chart on the wall. Something in you went quiet and wrong, and the only cure you know is the wheel.

So you spin it. The page turns. The wheel slows on a stranger.

The scroll stops on a price. Your thumb lifts from the glass and stays lifted.

You are in a different kitchen, on a chair with a cracked vinyl seat, the table's chrome edge pressing your forearm. A phone glows in your hand, and the watch on it costs more than the rent. The window is black. A refrigerator hums. Your leg is bouncing. You did not tell it to. It has been doing this for years.

Then the phone is face-down on the counter, and you let it lie.

The shirt comes first, a soft black tee gone thin at the collar. It touches your shoulder and you are standing in a stairwell, a boy in a Catholic school uniform holding a candle. Your mother's hand is on the back of your neck. The shirt knows her.

The jeans are stiff at the knee with something dried. They give you a morning: you, putting them on in the dark, one leg and then the other, the belt's worn hole, a pack of cigarettes tapped against the heel of your hand. You hear a school floor-buffer, the long hum of it down an empty corridor, and the tired pride of a clean hallway nobody will thank you for.

The keys at your hip bite through the cloth. You touch them, and a woman is laughing in a doorway. She is his ex-wife, and she is in a yellow dress. The laugh is a stake driven through him. He still hears it. There is a girl too, small, asleep in the back of a car, and his arms remember carrying her.

You look at the ring finger. A pale band of skin is there, and your thumb finds it without being asked.

On his upper arm, under the sleeve, there is script. You press it and a name and a date rise up, and with them a grief so ordinary and so large that you take your hand away.

His breath tastes of smoke. His back aches the way a back does at forty-seven. The cup beside you is cold, and his hands know exactly how heavy it is.

You turn your hand over. The knuckles are scarred, cracked from bleach, and good. They are yours now.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, to the face in it, silver hair and dimples that show even now, when nothing is funny.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Hello, Dennis."

The leg keeps bouncing. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him when the sun comes up.