Dustin Landry

You are standing in a baker's kitchen with flour to the wrist, and the oven light is the only light on. Esteban Rojas has been yours for less than a minute. Short legs, heavy belly, a goatee that itches, and the dough is already rising under the cloth. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. You have stood in this quiet and found you can't bear how well he fits. You had the body that worked, and it was no use to you, so you are leaving it standing at the counter with the oven ticking. Whatever he does next is his own business.

Then the wheel stops, and the baker is gone.

You are bent at the trailer with a trimmer in your left hand and the shaft of a mower under your right. The rhythm has just broken: one motion done wrong, then done again slowly. The street steams after the rain. The sun is up through the oak and the moss, and the air is already thick enough to chew.

Your shoulders are long and loose, and the six-foot-one of him tips you forward. The sweat in your collar is cold. The first thing the body reports is the drinking, a dull thumb pressed behind the eyes and a sourness in the back of the throat. You clear it. Then you blink hard, once, and realize both are habits and not yours.

The trimmer's handle is warm and slick with old fuel. Through it comes a flash, his and not yours: a spring afternoon, a girl of six on a porch step with a Popsicle dripping down her wrist, and the particular pride of being the man she runs to. Then a boy, younger, asleep in the truck's passenger seat with his mouth open. Your chest tightens with a feeling you have not earned.

The shirt is stiff across your back. It gives you the morning in pieces. His fingers working the buttons in the dark of a one-room-wide house, shotgun rooms lined up like a train, a woman's breathing in the next room, the floor cool under bare feet. He rolled the sleeves twice and no more. He always does. He hung the hat on the nail by the door and lifted it down without looking.

The boots are cracked, and your toes know exactly where. The earmuffs hang at your neck, cold against the skin. The jaw is rough under your knuckles. You touch the nose, the old break, crooked. A fist, a bar floor, a laughing friend, a bad night he is ashamed to remember.

You turn your forearm up. The tattoo is small and badly done, a thing he got drunk and regretted by the next noon. His shame goes through you, and it is warm and absurd.

Under the trailer chain the street breathes steam. The muscles of your forearms know this job better than you ever will. You turn the hand over. The calluses are hard as bark, the knuckles split. They are somebody's hands, and now they are yours.

You lift your eyes to the lens, and you hear yourself say, in a voice a little rougher than you expected, "Well. Hello."

How long this one lasts, you can't say. The wanting is quiet now. It always is, at first.