Dennis Michael Rafferty

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films, the old stories, the threads at two in the morning where strangers swear it happened to them. Tonight is nothing: work done, the feed scrolled flat, and then the page with the wheel on it. vessel.cards. You pay because you do not believe it. You spin because you have always wanted to.

The wheel clicks and slows.

Your thumb is moving. It is already moving, faster and steadier than a thumb has any right to be, flicking past whatever he had stopped on. Blue light sits on one cheek. The couch is lumpy under his hip, and the dark room is close and thick. The summer air has not moved in hours. Everyone in the house is asleep, and it is the middle of the night here while it is midday where you were. You do not blink, and then you do.

The sweatshirt is the first thing that talks. The cotton at the cuff is pilled and soft, and it gives you a morning: his hands pushing through these sleeves in a kitchen, one arm and then the other, the cold of a cul-de-sac before dawn. He was tired in a way sleep did not reach. Three kids' school photographs are stuck to a refrigerator with magnets. One of them has outgrown the magnet. He touched it going out. He always touches it.

The couch fabric is rough along your forearm, and it gives you the divorce. It was not shouting. It was a folder of papers on a table and his ex-wife's pen, and him clicking his own pen, click, click, because his hands needed something. You find it now: the right thumb working at nothing, wanting the plunger. The bare ring finger has a pale band of skin that the air touches strangely.

Your nose is wrong. There is a ridge in it and a slight lean. A memory comes with it, bright and stupid: a loading dock, a swinging door, a coworker laughing, and then the taste of pennies. He was twenty-six. He never minded.

Under all of it the body is honest. His lower back aches in a dull, familiar line. His belly is warm and soft against the phone-hand's elbow. His knees are old. His breath is slow, with a catch that smoked for twenty years and quit. Something in his chest remembers wanting a cigarette, and wants one now, a little. His hands know the weight of a package. They know how to turn a box so the label faces out. They know the handheld scanner on a hip, a cracked plastic button, the ramp of a van's open back in the heat.

He is Catholic, and it comes up through the bare soles of his feet: a hard pew, a candle he could not afford, a prayer for the kids that he says without words. Money is thin. Every month he counts it and it comes out the same.

You lift the phone away from your face. Your hand, his hand, turns over in the light. The knuckles are thick, the palm creased deep. You look up.

"Okay," you say, in his gravel. "Okay. Hello."

The room does not answer. You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting is already coming back.