Gary Lindholm

You are Darnell Whitmore, and you have been him for under a minute. The bus is still in your arms: the wide wheel, the long Anchorage dark, the cold in the cab that sits in the knees. Nearly midnight. You stand in the man's kitchen with his short black hair and his chinstrap and his brown eyes, and you know already what is wrong. He can't do anything you want. He is five-seven and tidy and fine, and fine is the problem. You want weight. You want to be a man a door has to make room for. You press the site open with his thumb and the wheel is already turning.

Then the rhythm breaks.

Your hand goes to the box and does it wrong, a half-turn too early, the corner catching the crate. You stop. You do it again, slowly, and correctly. The wet night comes in all at once: the street light buzzing, salt in the haze, neon pink laid across the tile, the van's dome light humming over cardboard. Ten more boxes, and you check each one, though this job has not needed checking in years.

Your jaw is clenched. It is his habit, and you notice it only because the teeth ache.

The brown shirt is damp across your back, and the cotton gives you a morning: a hand working the buttons from the bottom up because the top one always fights him, a quiet kitchen, a woman's voice from the next room saying drive safe, and his feeling about it, plain and warm, like a hand on the shoulder. The scanner on your belt knocks your hip, and under the plastic is a thousand stops, a dog behind a screen door, a lobby that smells of floor wax. The shorts have a cargo pocket with a vape in it, warm from his leg. Reaching for it opens a dull small shame, a promise made to children who don't know he breaks it, three of them, a hallway of names. His own breath is heavy in his chest. The belly sits forward and balanced. The knees complain a little, the shoulders don't, the arms are strong in the plain way of a man who lifts for a living. His shoes are worn soft to his feet, and the heel remembers the curb.

Another memory comes uninvited, an old girlfriend on a stoop years ago laughing at something he said, and it lands in you as longing that was never yours. You let it pass through. There is a rosary in a drawer somewhere in this man, and you feel the drawer without opening it.

You lift your hands into the dome light. They are broad, creased across the knuckles, with calluses like pale coins. You turn them over. They have carried everything he loved, and now they carry you.

You lift your eyes and look into the dark where someone could be watching. "Okay," you say, in a voice lower than any you have owned. "Let's see how long you last."

You don't know whether that is a promise or a question about yourself. Somewhere under your ribs the wanting is already asleep, and you can't tell when it will wake.