Gary Wayne Pasternak

Marcus Pryor's body is standing at a kitchen counter in Miami with the refrigerator humming behind it, and I'm thinking about the ice. It's a small thing. Four hours ago I took this body in the middle of a sentence it was saying to a man at a grill, and I have been trying to be kind to it ever since. Tonight I stood in the dark kitchen and tried to crack a tray of ice with the heel of my hand, the way I watched him do it on the first evening. It didn't work. The ice stayed whole, and the hand ached in a way that wasn't mine to ache. His wife's voice came down the hall, asleep and murmuring, and I stood very still so I wouldn't be known.

It isn't that he's wrong. He's tall, he's easy, and people lean toward him. But he is a man everyone is already glad to see, and I wanted to find out what it is to be a man nobody is waiting for. So the phone is in my hand, the page is open, and the wheel is going before I've finished deciding. The red hair is the first thing to go, along with the whole long, comfortable length of him.

The thumb starts again.

It's my thumb now, and it's moving too fast for the screen. The glow is on one cheek, the pillow is under the other, and there is a heaviness on my left side from lying on it too long. The air smells of old laundry, a little of menthol, and a dry house in October. A hand rests on the blanket in front of me. It's the right one, and it is not skin. It's warm from being under the covers, and I feel it only as pressure through the socket at the end of an arm that stops short.

The memories come through what I touch. The sheet under the good hand is cotton gone thin from washing, and it gives me his wife turning the mattress last spring, saying *we should just buy a new one*, and him saying *it's fine*, because a new one would cost more than the bed was worth to him. Then comes the collar of the T-shirt, soft and stretched. He sleeps in the shirt he wore under the polo today, and the polo is over the chair, navy, with the apartment company's name stitched on the chest. I can feel the afternoon in it. I feel the keys on his belt, the vacant unit, the wet leaves on the courtyard concrete, and the clipboard his arm clamps against his ribs. I know, as if I'd always known, that the prosthetic can hold a clipboard but not a pen. For the pen he uses the left, and his handwriting has gone square and careful over the years.

The phone is the hardest. It shows what he stopped on: a photograph of a woman I can tell is the ex-girlfriend, and a recent one. The feeling comes in a wave, and it's not mine. It is shame, and it is also a thin tenderness that has nowhere to go. He never did anything, he only looked. Under it is the wife, asleep one room over, and two grown children's names, and the ring pressing into the finger of the hand that holds the phone.

I turn the screen off. The dark is complete except for a gray rectangle of window with blinds.

The body is heavy and I like it. The belly sits against the mattress like a warm weight, and the back aches pleasantly from the day. His jaw is smooth, shaved close the night before, and I notice I'm touching it. There is a faint hunger in the chest where cigarettes used to live. He quit years ago, but the want didn't leave. He keeps it, like a coin in a pocket he no longer reaches into.

I lift the right hand and look at it. The fingers curl when I tell the shoulder to tell them, a small mechanical sound in the dark. I turn it over, and then the left, with its plain gold band. Both are mine for now.

"Hello, Gary," I say, quietly, to the ceiling.

His voice is rougher than I thought it would be, and sleepy. I lie there listening to how long this might last: until morning, or until the wanting comes back, or four minutes.