Doug Fennimore

You are Warren Teague, and you have been Warren Teague for one minute.

It is a good body. The beard is trimmed close, the shoulders are loose and strong, and a pastor's calm sits in the chest like a held note. The lamp in his study is yellow. A Bible lies open on the desk, and the pages smell of dust and cedar. A cup of tea has gone cold beside it. Somebody wrote a sermon here, and a thumb has worn the corner of one page soft.

You touched that page a minute ago and got a flash of a church basement, folding chairs, and a widow gripping his wrist. His pity came with it. It was warm and tired and entirely sincere. You stood there in his grief for her and felt nothing of your own.

That is why you are leaving. It was nothing he did. He is kind, and you can feel how kind he is, and it is like wearing a coat that fits someone else's heart. Every ache in him points toward a God who answers. You keep listening for the answer and hearing your own breath. A man should not have to be the stranger in his own prayers.

So you open the laptop. The wheel is already there, patient and bright. You pay, you spin, and the ticks go by like a clock being counted down.

Then you are sitting down in a chair that is not the chair.

There is a hum in your ears and a hard light in your face. Your right arm is stretched out, fingers closed around a thin cold stand. Your left hand rests on a mouse. Your mouth is in the middle of a word, and you finish it, slower than he would have, because you are choosing each sound. The screen shows a face with freckles across the nose and cheeks, and it is yours. Chat scrolls past faster than anyone is typing. The counter in the corner says 4.

The body is fifty-seven. You feel it at once. The lower back has a dull knot where he has sat too long, and the knees complain faintly when you shift. His eyes are tired from screens. But the hands are steady, the breath is deep, and the heart beats slow.

Then the sleeve against your wrist gives you the morning. It is a dark shirt with a small pattern, soft from washing. His fingers did the buttons from the bottom up, because he always does, and his wife... no, a girlfriend, her name stays out of reach. She laughed at the shirt once and said it made him look like a professor. He wore it anyway. He felt a little shy and pleased about it, and the feeling goes through you like warm water.

The ring light stand is cool under your palm. Memory comes through it, a child's voice. *Dad, hold it higher.* There is more than one child. Three, maybe more, voices overlapping across years, a kitchen and a car and a hospital corridor at four in the morning. His fear in that corridor is still in the metal. His love comes up after it and is so large that you almost let go of the stand.

The mouse under your left hand gives you something smaller and sadder: a woman in a doorway, years ago, with a suitcase. He never stopped wondering. The ache is old and well handled, like a stone carried in a pocket. He let her go and never said why, and he did not tell anyone, ever.

The floor is wood under his sneakers, worn gray with the letter N. The chair back presses a line along your spine. The room smells of warm dust, cables and stale coffee. The sounds come from the street, wet tires, a siren far off. He wanted to be seen by someone. A stranger sent him an app, and he said yes because the house was quiet. Four people were watching. He was nervous, and he was grateful for every one of them.

You lean in until the lens holds only the face.

You lift your hand off the mouse and turn it over. The palm is lined and the knuckles are a little thick. There is a faint pale band on one finger where, you realize, a ring used to sit and no longer does. It is his hand, and it is yours now.

You look up into the lens.

"Hello," you say, in his voice, carefully. "I'm here."

And under the word the question is already turning. How long, you wonder, before the wanting comes back? Is he still yours when the sun comes up?