Gary Lee Hostetler

You are Daniel Seo, and you are standing at the espresso machine with the portafilter in your hand, the steam wand screaming, when you understand you are done with him.

It isn't anything he did. He has been fine. Forty-six, a little soft through the middle, a unibrow you keep catching in the milk pitcher's curve. Nobody has been cruel. A woman in a green scrubs top says *oat, extra hot,* and you hear it, and you make it, and the hands know the whole motion, the knock of the grounds, the quarter turn. That is the trouble. He is a body that already knows everything it is going to do today. Under the counter his phone lights up with a name you do not know how to feel about, and you let it go dark. You have been him for less than a minute of your own time, and already the morning is a long hallway of oat, extra hot.

You wipe your palms on his apron. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

*

Plastic, under you. A chair whose seat has a split in it, and the edge of the split is picking at your jeans. A strip light hums on the ceiling and the air smells of floor wax and old coffee and, under it, someone's wet wool coat. A red number on the wall says 47, and then it clicks, and the knee that was bouncing against the underside of your hand goes still.

You have a paper cup of water on the little tablet arm beside you, gone warm. You set it down square, though it was already down. His hands fold. They are not your hands, but they do it the way you would put a thing away: thumb over thumb. Someone says a name down the hall, and it is his, and you do not look up.

*

The jacket is the first thing that talks. Gray nylon, a zipper pull worn smooth, and when your thumb finds the cuff it finds a tiny split in the seam, and you are suddenly in a cab at first light with the engine ticking, pulling this jacket on over cold arms. The morning comes sleeve by sleeve. Right arm first, always. The tee under it is a soft green he has had so long it has stopped having a color. Jeans, the left knee thin. He stood in a motel bathroom in Joliet and took the toothpick out of its paper sleeve with his teeth before he had even buttoned the fly.

You notice the toothpick is not there. Your mouth is hunting for it. Your tongue goes along the back of his teeth, and your right hand lifts of its own accord to the pocket of his shirt, and there it is, and a whole habit sits down inside you.

Then the ring finger. You turn your hand over and the skin there is pale, a band of it, smooth as the inside of a shell, and when your thumb rubs the place a kitchen arrives. Yellow light, a pot lid ticking. A woman's back at the stove, and the feeling that comes with it is not yours at all: a long tired tenderness, and under it the sense of a door he was too slow to hold. Three kids at the table, one of them kicking the chair leg. A girl with her hair in a wet braid, shouting that it was her turn. You get the weight of that girl on his shoulders at some fair, her sneakers against his chest. He misses her in a place low in the ribs.

The nose next. You press the bridge and it is crooked under your finger, and the memory is white and brief: a loading dock, a chain-binder swinging loose, a bang, and then a long ringing quiet and the taste of pennies. He set it himself in the truck mirror, crying from the pain, laughing at himself.

His back aches, low and left, the honest ache of eleven hours of seat. His shoulders are strong, though, and his thighs. The body is better than yours was. It wants to stand. It wants to be walked.

Down the hall the name is called again. Something folded in his chest is afraid of the room behind that door, and you feel the fear without being told what is in it.

*

You look at his hands. The crooked knuckle. The pale ring-mark. They lie there, a stranger's, entirely yours.

You lift your eyes and say it to the room, to nobody, in a voice a little lower than any you've had:

"All right. Let's see what you were scared of."

And under it, in the part that never quite goes quiet, the question is already there, small and patient: how long this one lasts, and whether, tomorrow, you will still be him.