Dwayne Kilgore

Matthew Dorsey's apartment is dark, and the refrigerator hums in the kitchen. You are standing at the counter in his socks with his laptop open, and the wheel is already on the screen.

He is thirty-eight and he is fine. His knees are good, his job is easy, and he has a scar through his left eyebrow that your thumb keeps finding. He is a body that works, and that is the trouble with him. You came to him less than a minute ago and you already know every drawer in this place would feel the same. There is a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. Someone texted him goodnight, and you have not answered it and you won't. Nothing in here is wrong. Something small and hungry in you has woken anyway, and he cannot feed it. You pay. His thumb presses the key.

Mid-stride.

Your left foot is coming down and then it isn't. The ground goes missing for two steps and you catch it on the other foot, arms hanging lower than they were, head still. Cold air pours into a chest that is already working hard. You can see your breath. A canal lies off to the right, flat and gray, and mist is lifting off it. Gravel crunches under your shoes. Something buzzes on your left wrist, a split time he never ran.

A tune is playing in your ears, and you don't know the song.

You keep moving because stopping would be strange. The hoodie drags at the shoulders. It is zipped halfway and smells of smoke, wet cotton and the inside of a truck. When the fabric brushes your jaw, the first memory opens in his feeling and not yours.

It is a quarter to five in a dark bedroom. He sits on the edge of the bed and the sleeve of this hoodie is bunched on the floor. He feels for it with his foot. His knees ache in a dull way he has stopped noticing. A rosary hangs from the lamp, a gift from his mother that he has never taken down and never prayed on, though some mornings he touches it with one finger. He pulls the gray shirt over his head, then the hoodie, then laces the boots he never bought running shoes to replace. He tells himself every dawn that he will, and every dawn he doesn't.

Your right hand lifts to wipe your nose, and the knuckles crack on their own. The sound lands inside you and another flash comes with it. He is on a scaffold plank with a crew below him, and he cracks them while he waits for the crane. Men watch him the way they watch a man who knows where everything goes. Steel is going up behind him, beam by beam. He loves that more than he would ever say. A building comes out of nothing because he told eleven men where to stand.

The watch touches your wrist and the strap is damp. You look down, and the face shows a number you did not earn. Under the strap, on the inside of your forearm, there is lettering, a name and a date. The skin there remembers a needle, a bad winter, a chair in a shop on Memorial Drive. The feeling that comes with it is so heavy that you nearly stop. You do not learn who the name was. You get only the weight of it, and it is enough.

Your lungs burn and ask for a cigarette. Twenty years of a pack a day are in there, and so is the habit of lighting one at the end of a run, as if the run were a debt. Your left eye does not move with the right one. The world sits slightly wrong there, a half-second behind and a little to the side, and he has stopped minding. Later, you think, you could mind it for him.

Then you stop on the gravel and lift your hand into the pale light. You turn it over. It is thick across the palm, scarred at the web, a stranger's, and it is yours until you spin again.

You raise your eyes to the empty path.

"Alright," you say, in his low voice, with the cold in it. "Let's see how long you last."