Desmond Pruitt

It is nearly midnight and there is nothing on. I have scrolled past everything twice. The thread I end up in is the old one, the one I always end up in: people describing what it would be like to wake up as somebody else. I have read those for years. I have watched every film where a stranger looks down at borrowed hands. Tonight a page with a wheel on it is asking for a card number, and I don't believe it, and I type the number anyway. The wheel turns. Something clicks into place under my thumb.

Then there is cold air and a shovel handle across my shoulder.

Daylight, flat and gray. Wet street, orange netting, the diesel tick of a small machine idling beside me. My right hand is up, holding the shovel by its D-grip. My left hangs down. My weight sits on the right boot, and I do not decide that. The body was already standing that way.

The grip is worn smooth, and the handle gives me the first thing. It is a spring morning, six years back, and a foreman is saying *you hold it like it owes you money*. The pride in it is warm and stupid. He kept that handle through two crews because the wood fit his palm.

My left hand is already moving. The thumb finds the plain band on the ring finger and turns it, round and round. That brings a kitchen, a woman's back at a stove, and three small voices arguing over a cereal box. His chest goes tight with a love so ordinary it has no edges. I am only borrowing it, and it nearly knocks me down.

The shirt is stiff with dried mud, and the reflective tape scratches at my ribs. The morning comes up through the cotton. He pulled it off a chair in the dark. The hallway floor was cold. His daughter's sneaker was in the way and he moved it with his foot. He stood on the stoop with a cigarette, the street shining under the sodium light, and he thought about nothing except that it would rain.

My lungs know that cigarette. They want one, a pack-a-day want, low and patient. Under it is something older: a drink he stopped drinking. He has not had one in four years, and he keeps the count the way he keeps the ring turning.

The hard hat presses a band into my forehead. My jeans are heavy at the knee with wet clay. My calves ache from the trench, and my shoulders are strong and a little sore. The right forearm itches under ink I haven't seen yet. I understand without looking that it is a cross and hands folded in prayer. It is not church. It is a promise he made his mother, and the rest he keeps private.

The bucket of the excavator sits where he left it. His body wants to move, and one motion comes out wrong, a half-second stumble in a rhythm ten thousand repetitions deep. Then I do it again slowly, checking, and it is right.

I lower the shovel and look at my hand. It is broad and scarred across the knuckles, with the ring dull on the finger, and it is not mine. I turn it over. Then I look up, straight ahead, and I say, low, "Okay. Okay."

The street goes on. I have him now. I don't know whether that means for an hour or for years, or when the wanting will start up again.