Frank Delaney Moretti

You are standing at a counter in Denver, in a kitchen that smells of coffee gone bitter, and the body you wear is forty-two and heavy and has been yours for less than a minute. Paul Hendricks. Your thumb is still on the glass of his phone. The reason is small and you will not say it: a moment ago the hand that held the mug shook a little and the heaviness sat on his chest like a folded coat. You are not frightened. You are only done. You tap the wheel.

It turns, and you are somewhere else without moving.

Dark. A couch gives under you, soft and sagging at the left. The air is dry from the radiator and smells of old coffee and paper. Blue light moves on your face. The television cuts to a bright frame and you sit up straight. The remote comes out of your fingers and lands on the couch arm. Your spine is long. Your feet are bare on a rug that scratches a little.

The rug first: wool, worn flat where a path of feet has gone. A flash comes up through the soles. A small girl's heels drumming on it while she lies on her stomach and colors, and his patience, enormous and tired and glad. It goes.

The sweatpants are cotton, soft at the knee, and the memory is of this morning: no, last night, pulling them from the dryer still warm, his wife's hand taking the other leg to fold it, the two of them not talking, content. The gray shirt clings at the wrist. Sleeve by sleeve he pulled it on after a shower, shoulders aching from ten hours of lifting spools, the left one clicking.

The remote on the arm: you do not touch it. The couch fabric under your palm is rough, and through it comes the shift he works, the extrusion line, plastic coming out hot and pale as a long tongue, the roar through the yellow earplugs, the way his hands know the dial without him. Twenty-six years. He is good at it. He is proud and has never said so.

Your left thumb finds the ring and turns it. Her name nearly arrives, then a kitchen, a fight years ago about money, and the quiet after. His knees are strong. His back is sore. His heart is steady and slow. He does not drink anymore, and the missing of it is a small clean room in him.

You lift your hands into the blue light. Black ink winds up the forearms, and the plain band sits on the finger. You turn them over. They are wide and scarred with work, and they are yours.

You look up and say into the dark, "Okay. Let's see how long."

Somewhere the wheel is already waiting, and you do not know whether this is a minute or a year.