Dustin Kramer

You are Wendell Teague, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. The freckles on the back of your hands are fine. The six-foot-four is fine. What is wrong is that the pallet jack in aisle nine is pulling left, and the scanner on your belt chirps for the next pick, and you stand there with the whole long athletic length of him humming and think: it is not enough to have a body that works. You wanted one that surprised you. You do not say this even inside. You thumb the site open on your phone, the wheel there, and the noon sun through the warehouse door lies across your knuckles. You pay. You spin.

Then the cold of the trench is in your boots.

You are halfway through a swing of the shovel. Mid-motion, the blade goes in wrong, a skid on a stone, and your wrist corrects it, slow now, deliberate, the way you would do a thing you had never done. Again. Again. Ten shovelfuls, each one checked, and the body keeps reaching for a rhythm you have not got.

The handle comes first. Ash wood, worn smooth where his palms ride it, and it hands you a morning: a dented truck, a coffee going cold on a dash, a boss named Hal saying the trench has to be to grade by Friday. The glove is stiff with dried mud, and in it a night in a kitchen, a girlfriend's back turned at the sink, nothing said, his stomach tight. Under that, softer, the ex, a laugh in a parked car, which he still turns over like a coin.

The shirt against your back is the yellow one, and it gives you the dressing: the bedroom dark, the shirt off a chair, one sleeve then the other, the gray thermal under it because the morning bit. Jeans stiff at the knee. He rolled the left cuff twice, always, because of the tattoo on the calf, the unit insignia, and the cold air on that bare skin carries a whole other year, a barracks, a bunk, boys who are men now and scattered. He is proud of that and tells almost no one.

Your hand rises to your face without asking. Fingers in the two-inch beard, along the moustache. That is his. The hard hat presses a band across a forehead where the hair has backed away into its M. You never knew that dyed red could feel like a small stubborn joke he is telling the town. The body is thin, wire and tendon, a low ache across the lower back, shoulders that burn pleasantly. Thirty-two years old. A little money tucked away, and a Saturday night once or twice a month that he does not regret.

The mini excavator ticks beside you, cooling. Up the street the one light turns green over the closed diner, and no one goes through it.

You turn your hand over. Not yours. Not Wendell's. Callus at the base of each finger, dirt in the creases.

You look up and say, to nobody, to the street, "Alright. Let's see how long you last." Underneath it the other question sits, quiet: how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him tomorrow.