Garrett Lowell Sorensen

The screen is bright and the morning is nothing. I have been scrolling past the same things for an hour, and what I keep returning to is the thing I always return to: the man who wakes up in someone else's hands. I have read every thread about it. I have watched every film. Tonight, or this morning, whichever it is, there is a page with a wheel on it, and the wheel is for sale. I do not believe it. I pay anyway. I spin, and the wheel slows like a held breath.

Then I am standing.

There is a blade in my right hand, a knife so small and sharp it hardly weighs anything. My left palm is flat on white foam, pressing the corner of a little building down against a plywood table. The cut was halfway made. My hand did it wrong, a half-second slip in a motion it has made ten thousand times, and then, slowly, correctly, I fix it. I do the next one carefully, and the one after that. Each one gets a check it hasn't needed in years. I am being careful because I am new.

The room is cold and smells of foam dust and old coffee. Through the tall window there is a public staircase between backyards, and wet leaves are plastered on the concrete in late, thin light. Is it a Sunday? The studio is empty, so it must be. He came in alone on a day off to finish something.

The sweater is first. Black wool, soft at the neck, and where it rubs my wrist his memory comes up: this morning, a bedroom gone gray with early light, his wife asleep, his arms into these sleeves quietly so as not to wake her. He pulled the collar straight at the mirror and saw his own dimples, there even when he wasn't smiling, and was embarrassed by them again, as he has been since he was a boy.

The ring is next, a plain band on the left hand against the foam. A flash: the day it went on, a hot chapel hallway, his hands shaking so badly that the ring nearly dropped. And under it, a second, older ache, another woman, the first marriage, a house sold, a kitchen with the cabinets half empty. He still sends her a message on their daughter's birthday. Their daughter. A girl at a school desk, a gap where a tooth was. He loves her in a way that goes through the ribs.

I flex my fingers and they crack on their own, knuckle after knuckle, a habit older than any of his worries. Money, I get from the handle of the knife: a bank balance he doesn't look at, the firm that keeps cutting hours, so he takes weekends here on his own time to win a commission that might not come. Never a drink, never a cigarette. Sundays, a pew, a hymn he knows in his chest, a small hand in his.

The body is tall, a long spine, a shoulder that complains, a lower back stiff from standing too long at the table. His glasses sit warm on my nose. The beard is a small coarse weight on my jaw.

I set the knife down. I look at my hands. The ring, the knuckles, the white dust in the creases. I turn them over.

Then I look up, at the window and the stairs and the leaves, and I say, in his low voice, "Hello."

How long do I get? I don't know when the wanting will come back.