Farid Hosseini

You are Dustin Yazzie, and you have been him for three days and twenty-three hours. You are standing in a courtyard of dry palms, and the late sun is on the stucco. Your knees are good. Your shoulders are wide. Nothing is wrong with this body. You have run it hard and it has answered. Still, your thumb keeps going to the phone in your pocket, to the page with the wheel on it, and you will not say why. Something in the lecture hall this afternoon. A girl laughed, and you did not know whether she was laughing at you, and he would have known. You sit on the low wall and pay. The wheel turns, and you let go of Dustin like a rope.

Dark. A couch takes your weight, soft and sagging at the left. The television throws blue light, and a remote lies loose in your right hand. You sit up straight and set it down on the arm. The weight settles low and forward, a belly under a sweater. Your breath is slow and wide. Something on the screen was funny a second ago, and you almost see why.

The sweater first. Wool, a little rough at the cuffs, pilled at the elbows. Your thumb finds a small snag on the chest, and the morning arrives in his hands. He pulled it over his head in the bedroom with the closet door open, and his wife said, "That one again?" He said it was warm. Left sleeve, then right, the cuff catching the ring. Then the lanyard in the cleanroom, the white suit, the satellite on its stand under lights so bright it felt like being inside a held breath. He loved the satellite. He did not love his manager. Then the bright place closed and he drove home with the radio off.

The ring is cool and a little tight. Pressing it brings her: Neda, laughing in the kitchen, flour on her wrist, saying his name as if it were a small joke between them. And behind her, older, a different woman at a bus stop in rain, the one who got away. He never said what he should have. The ache is old and tidy, kept like a folded shirt.

His right hand drifts. It wants a pen. The thumb clicks nothing, click, click, the habit of years of thinking in margins. Under the bare soles, the rug is thick and warm, and it gives you the apartment's first winter, the two of them carrying this couch up the stairs, arguing, happy. Money was short. It is always short. He does not mind as much as he should.

Your calves are tired from standing all day. The beard is soft against your fingertips, and the mole on his cheek is a small, dark thing you touch without meaning to. Down the hall a faucet drips. The show goes on. You do not laugh where he would have.

You lift his hands into the blue light and turn them over. Thick fingers, a plain band, ink faint at one knuckle. They are warm, and they are yours, for now.

"Hello," you say, in his low voice, to the dark. "Let's see how long."