Elias Tsosie

You are Victor Hwang, and you are sitting in a break room in Atlanta with a sandwich you haven't touched. The forklift idles somewhere behind the wall. Your thighs are soft against the plastic chair. The unibrow itches when you frown, and you have been frowning for an hour. You have worn him less than a minute and already know there is nothing in him you want. That is not his fault. Something about the pallets, the numbers on the tags, the way a body this size sits in a seat like an apology. The phone is warm in your hand. The wheel is already open on it. You press.

Then the curb is under your boot and a bin is in your gloves.

The lid is cold plastic, tipped halfway. Your arms are already moving, the lift and the hook and the shove, and the rhythm breaks. One motion comes out wrong, a half second late, the bin slipping on the lip. You do it again, slowly, correctly. The ten that follow come out checked, each one, as if you were afraid of them.

The glove leather is stiff and warm, and it gives you something. A kitchen, dark, before five. A woman's hand on the back of this neck, a thumb pressing once, and the feeling is simple: *go on, I'm awake.* The coveralls are next. Zipper teeth on the chin, then the left sleeve, then the right, pulled on in the dark so as not to wake the girls. Cuffs turned twice because the sleeves run long. Reflective tape that has gone gray at the elbows. The boots, laced standing up because bending hurts the lower back, and it does now. A low, patient ache, a hand pressed into the spine, and under it the strength: shoulders that have lifted this bin forty thousand times, thighs that take the curb without being asked.

The right hand drums against the steel of the step, four fingers, a quick tattoo. You didn't tell it to. A song comes with it, a truck radio, a girl before the wife, dust on a different road. Her name is almost there. He kept it the way you keep a stone in a pocket, and it never weighed anything. The ring is tight under the glove. Dust sits in the throat. Turquoise paint peels across the street, and the sun is already hard on the back of the neck.

You look down. Thick fingers in the gloves, the ring pushing at the leather. You turn one hand over, then lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower than yours has ever been. "Hello."

The truck idles. Somewhere a dog starts up. You flex the fingers and wonder how long.