Dwight Kessler

You are inside Wesley Burkett, and he is already too small a thing to stay in. Mid-morning in Rural Texas, a Tuesday. You are at his desk with his big hands flat on a drawing of a gearbox he designed and does not care about. He is twenty-nine, six-two, heavy, blue-eyed, and a body that works. It does. That is the trouble. At nine you opened a drawer and found a ring of keys that opened nothing you wanted. You have been him for less than a minute, and the wanting has already come back, the way hunger does, without asking. So you spin. The wheel clicks over, and the screen goes white.

You are lying on your side, and the light is on your face.

A corner of foil has peeled from the window and laid a bar of heat across one cheek. You turn from it. Then you turn back into it and open your eyes into the glare and hold them there, not blinking, until the white goes gold.

The mattress is thin under your hip, and you can feel the springs through it. Your mouth tastes like a night shift: stale coffee, dust, a mint gone to nothing. Your boots stand on the carpet where you left them. Your arm is under your head and has gone dead to the elbow. Needles run down it when you move.

You press the heel of one palm into the mattress, and the room starts to give itself up.

The shirt on your back is damp and gray, and it has been slept in. It hands you this morning. The cold of the loading dock at six, and your thumbs working the cuffs down over your wrists before the first trailer. Then the long haul of it, box after box, thirty pounds, fifty, the tape gun's scream. You can feel the stacking in your shoulders, a trench the work has dug there: the left one is worse, grinding when you lift it past the ear. Then clocking out into a morning that had gone yellow, the sky to the west stacking up black over cut wheat stubble. You remember the drive home with the window down. The smell of rain coming, which is not rain yet.

The trousers are stiff at the knee. They give you a kitchen, and a woman standing at a counter with her back to you, saying your name softly so as not to start anything. Your wife. There is no face, only the warmth of her and the tiredness of how long you have both been careful. Foil, you hear yourself say, and she laughs, and the tape is in your hand, silver, the crinkle loud in the quiet house. You taped the window yourself, on your knees, a bad job, at the corner.

You drag your hand across your jaw and find stubble. A mole under the eye catches your knuckle. Then comes a small child's weight asleep against your chest in some other afternoon, heavy and damp-haired, and you hold still inside it for as long as it will let you.

You close your fist, and the knuckles crack, one, two, three. The habit is so old your hand does it without you. Behind it, quieter, comes a dry throat and a promise made on a church floor, and a glass that you pushed away. Sober by decision, every day, a thing you chose again this morning. Nobody gave it to you. It is not yours, and it holds you anyway.

The ring is a plain band, worn thin. Under it, faintly, a girl from before, a porch, a summer. It passes through like a car passing the window. There's no money anywhere in this body, only work.

You lift your hand into the light and turn it over. Cracked skin, a ridge of callus, gray hair on the wrist. It is yours now.

You look up and say, to the room, in a voice that is low and rough with sleep, "Well. Hello."

The light lies on your face. Somewhere a thunderhead is turning over. You do not know how long you will have this one. You wait to see when the wanting comes.