Dwight Ray Combs

You are at a screen, and the evening is nothing. Work is over, the scrolling has gone stale, and nothing is on. You have wanted this since before you had words for it: the films where someone wakes up in another man, the threads at two in the morning. Nobody ever sold it until now. You do not believe the page. You pay anyway, and the wheel turns.

Then you are standing up, a fork halfway to your mouth.

There is no fall and no warning. A kitchen holds you, heavy with cold air and old coffee. The coat is still on your shoulders, stiff canvas, and the weight of you sits in your heels. The fork is in your fingers, and the fingers know it. Lit rice and something salty hang a few inches from your open mouth. The window over the sink has gone dark blue, and your reflection is a smear in it.

The fork comes down. You set it on the counter, and the click is loud.

Then it starts, through whatever touches you. The coat collar scrapes your neck, and the feeling goes backward. This morning, a cold truck cab. His arms went into these sleeves one at a time while the heater ticked, the flannel under it buttoned wrong and fixed at a stoplight. The canvas has the dust of a graded site in it, red clay worked into the cuffs. You shrug it off and it falls heavy over a chair. Sitting, you feel the plastic of the chair seat through the denim, and a different afternoon opens: a table, a girl of nine across it, doing homework, her tongue between her teeth. His chest goes tight with a love so plain it needs no name. Her mother is in the doorway, drying her hands, tired of him. He knew it, and let it be.

The container is cool in your palm. Your thumb finds the left ring finger and rubs the pale band of skin there, a habit his body keeps. A flash: a hallway, a box carried out to a car, and the long quiet after he did not ask her to stay. You take another mouthful, even and slow, because his jaw wants to. Your knees ache the way forty-seven years of climbing onto tracks makes them ache. His shoulders are strong and tired. His palms are rough, and they remember a lever, the sweet shudder of a blade biting clay, a creek running brown under a cable bridge where he sometimes stands after work and smokes one cigar and tells nobody.

Your hands are in front of you. You turn them over, freckled across the backs, the tan line pale on one finger. Then you lift your eyes to the black window and the stranger holding your gaze.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Okay. Hello."

Your stomach turns over. How long do you get him? Until the wanting comes back, which could be years, or by the time this rice is cold.