Dwight Kuykendall

You are leaving Terrence Boykin because of a pair of boots.

They were by the door of his apartment, laced, waiting, and you stood over them this morning with his big warm hands hanging and understood that he had never once in forty years been in a hurry. The picker's calm: a man who takes one carton at a time. His shoulders ached in the good way. The beard under your palm was soft. Nothing was wrong with him. That was the trouble. You had been him for less than a minute, and already the whole day lay down in front of you like a shift. So you opened the page with the wheel on it, and paid, and watched it turn.

Seven.

The number stops in your mouth, which is his mouth, and the lamp is a white sun overhead. Then the dark breaks, and you are flat on your back in a paper gown, with a cup of rubber over your face and cold in the veins of your arm. Your hand is on your stomach. It opens. It closes. Twice, testing. Your eyes slide left to right under the lids, once, like a man reading a line. Monitors keep their long sleeping rhythm. Nobody notices anything. Somewhere in the building it is two in the morning of a body that works nights, and you are in the middle of its sleep.

The gown is thin. Under it the skin remembers a shirt. Black, buttoned, worn soft at the cuffs, a bar rag over the shoulder. The memory comes up through the cotton against your ribs. His hands rolling the sleeves twice, forearm by forearm, the left cuff first because the wedding band catches. A morning in a kitchen with a gravel road beyond the window and a water tower standing small on the horizon. A wife's voice from the next room, asking if he ate. A toothpick already between his teeth.

The ring is a tight little cool circle on the finger. It gives you more. A courthouse, a hot day, her laughing at his tie. Two children who are somewhere in the house, loud, barefoot on linoleum. Then the other woman, the old girlfriend, older than the marriage, a screen door slapping, a feeling he has folded small and never opened out loud.

Under the right sleeve of the gown the ink pulls: BELIEVE. A church folding chair, hymnals, his mother's hand on the back of his neck. Under the left, a name and a date, and a grief you only brush against, like a hot pan, and pull back from.

Your nose is wrong. It breathes crooked around the mask, a ghost of a fight in a parking lot and the bright snap of it, and the ridiculous pride of having been hit. Your jaw is smooth. He shaved it before dawn, careful, for the surgeon, for his wife. The heavy body sits on the table like a sack of warm sand. The knees ache. The back is tired from years of lifting kegs at the wrong angle. The fingers know the weight of a bottle's neck, the quick pour, the count in the wrist. They are bored without a toothpick.

Nothing in his bank is more than a few thousand dollars. Everything else he owns is in that kitchen.

You lift the hand off the gown and turn it over. Thick palm, ring, the pale line where it sits. You raise your eyes to the lamp, then past it, and say softly, "Well. Look at that."

The monitor keeps its rhythm. You wonder how long this one holds, and whether you will feel the wanting come back before the nurse says his name.