Eli Brandt

Marcus Whitlock's apartment is quiet in the way a house is quiet when everyone in it is breathing slowly. His wife sleeps down the hall, and the refrigerator hums. You are standing at the kitchen counter in his socks with his phone lit in your hand, the wheel's page open, the one button waiting.

He worked. That was never the trouble. He had a lazy eye that made people think he was looking at someone behind them, and a manager's patience, and a body that did what it was told. But tonight you went to the bathroom mirror and the eye drifted a little to the left as it always does, and you found you could not stop waiting for it to correct itself. Somebody had to be wearing this who did not mind. It was not that he failed you. Something small had stopped fitting, and you pressed the button before you could explain it to yourself.

The wheel turns. It clicks down its pegs, slows, and settles.

Then there is no kitchen. There is a mattress under your chest and a pillow against your cheek, and your breath is tearing in and out, ragged, a sleeper's argument with a dream. You make it even in one breath. An arm hangs off the edge, heavy, the fingertips almost touching carpet. You draw it up. You roll onto your back, and your hands fold at your chest on their own, a way he has never once slept.

The room is dark blue and orange. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheets in one thin bar. The air smells of laundry that never made it into a drawer, and faintly of something sweet and chemical, a vape pen somewhere close.

Then the things touch you, and he comes back in pieces.

The T-shirt is soft and thin at the collar, and it opens first. It is the shirt he sleeps in because it was the one left clean. He pulled it over his head after a shift, hair damp, and thought only of rent. Then the sheet under your palm, rough and cheap, and a flash of lying here in October with his phone on his chest, typing a message to her and deleting it. She likes it when he calls instead. He calls. Her laugh is in his ear, and he feels the warmth in his own chest, not yours.

Your fingers move, unasked, up to your scalp, and run back through the hair. It is longer than you expected, stiff from the dye. A bathroom, a towel on his shoulders, red running pink down his wrists, his friend saying hold still. He was so pleased with it. Nobody at church said anything, and he decided that meant they were being kind.

Church. A folding chair, a worship band slightly out of tune, his knees bouncing. He believes it, and it is not a performance. A prayer comes up in him, half-formed, a habit of the mouth, and you let it pass through without answering.

The body underneath is young and wired. You are small in it, five-five, and the mattress seems large. The muscles in your thighs are tight from running, the dull ache of someone who stays fit by moving rather than by trying. There is little money. You feel it as a tightness, a number in his head he checks before buying anything, and the knowledge that his laptop is the most expensive thing in the room.

Your thumb finds the pad of your index finger and rubs it, and out of that comes a morning: the courtyard, dry palms, stucco gone gold in the late sun, his backpack heavy on one shoulder. He stands there with the strap cutting in, hoodie sleeves pushed up, and for no reason he is happy.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are narrow, and the knuckles are chapped. You do not know them, but they will do what you ask.

You look up at the dark ceiling and say, softly, in a voice that is higher than the one you had a minute ago, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere in the pocket of the night is the page with the wheel. It is only a thought, and it is already there.