Frank Dombrowski

You leave Gregory Hollis the way you'd leave a coat on a chair. Six minutes in him and you already know the gap in his front teeth by tongue, the goatee that itches under the jaw, the thin wrists that did not want to lift the laptop lid. The house in Ohio is silent: a furnace ticking, a dog behind a door, his whole street asleep. You are standing at his kitchen counter in the dark with the page open, and what sent you back is small and stupid. He is an engineer, and the circuit diagram taped to his refrigerator is one you cannot read. The numbers sit in his head like locked drawers. You wanted a body that worked and got one that knows things you can't get at. Your thumb comes down on the wheel.

The wheel spins. The kitchen goes.

Dark, and a weight. You are face-down, and the weight is you: a belly pressed into a mattress, a cheek mashed against a sheet gone warm and damp. Your breath is ragged, then it is not. It evens out in one pull. Light lies in a stripe through the curtains, and your arm hangs off the edge, heavy as a sandbag. You draw it up. The body rolls over, a big slow turn, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. It is not how he sleeps. Somewhere in the muscle that is known.

The sheet is under your fingers, and it gives you something. A woman's laugh in this room, a Sunday, her feet cold against his calves, and the shame-sweet feeling of being forgiven for something said at dinner. The T-shirt, soft from a thousand washes, is against your ribs. It gives you the morning he pulled it on in the dark, one sleeve and then the other, careful not to wake her, because he works days at a front desk and the copier takes forever to warm up and he likes to be there first. He prays in the hallway, silently, one hand on the doorframe, thanking God for the paycheck that is never enough.

The ring is a cool band against your sternum. It gives you a stoop in the rain, a small child asleep on his shoulder, and the ache of carrying her up the stairs with a bad knee. Under it, quieter, an old girlfriend's name that he doesn't say. Your back aches in the lower left. Your stomach is warm and round. The stubble rasps against your collar. Your cheeks, when you test them, pull into dimples without being asked. The upper ear throbs where the cartilage ring sits. The tribal ink on your arm is a memory of being twenty-two and stupid and happy.

You bring your hand up into the streetlight. Thick fingers, ring, dark hair on the knuckles. You turn it over. You look up.

"Hello, Frank," you say, and his voice is low and sleep-rough, and it is yours. Somewhere the wheel is already waiting, patient as a held breath, and you do not know whether this lasts the night.