Frank Morrison

You are standing in Lyle Danforth's kitchen with the lights off, and his big hand is flat on the counter. The tile is still warm from the day. You have been him for less than a minute, which is the whole trouble. He is six-three and he fills the doorway of his own life, and nothing in him is wrong. You can feel the length of his back, the old scar pulling his eyebrow a little tight. It is Monday night and the trade wind is moving the curtain. Somewhere on this island a woman is waiting for a man who is not you. You are not going to answer her. It is not that he failed at anything. He lifted a sofa today without trying, and he didn't need you for that. But you are tired of being the one who needs nothing. You want to be wanted by something, even by a stranger's tiredness, and you want a body that has to be lived in. So you open the page, and the wheel starts, and Lyle's hand goes slack on the tile.

The kerb goes out from under you.

Wet street, two in the morning, and you lurch off the edge into the gutter with a stranger's whole weight. Your palm slaps the cold roof of a parked car and holds you up. Your breath is sour, whiskey in the back of the throat, and the world slides a half-second behind itself. Your left shoe has stopped scuffing. You notice that because the sound is gone. The street is quiet and shining.

You straighten, and the ground is nearer than it should be. Lyle was a tower, and this man is a short, compact thing close to the earth. Your balance is low and your center is dense. Your knees ache in a flat dull way, forty-eight years of standing. Then the first thing comes, through the jacket.

The cloth is stiff canvas, open at the front, cold at the cuffs. A flash arrives that isn't yours: this morning, the hook by the door, the jacket coming down off it. His girlfriend's laugh from the other room, saying he'd freeze. He said it's Phoenix and she said it's February. He put one arm in, then the other, and he felt like a man being put away neatly. The feeling is quiet pleasure with nothing grand in it. You carry on past the car.

The flannel against your chest is soft from washing, the collar worn thin. A sleeve brushes your wrist and you get a shift at the line before this. A door panel comes down on its hook, and the air tool kicks in his right hand, and eleven bolts go in before the next one swings in. His body knows it. Your fingers curl around nothing and find the grip, and your wrist wants to turn. Twenty-six years of it. There is pride in it, small and stubborn, and under the pride a long grey ache, because nobody has ever asked him what he'd rather have done.

The jeans are heavy with wet at the hems. You keep walking and your thigh gives the memory up. A kitchen, a kid on the counter, one of three, swinging a heel against the cupboard while he stands between her knees and cuts a Band-Aid with his teeth. Her name is there, nearly, then the others, and a fierce soft fear that gets into your throat. Three of them. You hadn't expected to be handed that. You hadn't asked. It fits you like a coat that is too warm.

You put your hand in the jacket pocket, and the bitten edge of your thumbnail catches on the lining. Your teeth want it. The habit rises before you do. In the pocket there is a folded receipt, a bar's name, and a taste comes with it: the last whiskey, the one he didn't need, ordered because the woman who is not his girlfriend had married someone else in a church he never saw. It was years ago. He still goes quiet when he drinks. He drinks maybe three times a year, and tonight was one of them. He is not a man who tells anyone this. You know it now, and it is not yours, and you hold it anyway.

The corner is ahead, a red light on nothing, the laundromat sign buzzing. His apartment is to the right. You can feel it there like a magnet, the key, the girlfriend's shoes by the door. Your body begins to lean that way and you let it lean. Then you turn left.

You stop under the sign and lift your hands into the light. Short fingers, square, the nails bitten to the quick, a grey line of grease in the creases. A freckled wrist. You turn them over slowly. They are warm and entirely real.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower and rougher than you expected, the voice of a man at the end of a night. "Hello."

You don't know how long you'll have this one. A year, or until the wanting comes back, which could be in four minutes.