Gerald Blevins

You've been Aidan for two minutes, and already you know why you're leaving him. It is the doorframe. You stood in the narrow hallway of his apartment in Chicago, and your hand went up to the lintel the way a hand goes up for a thing that should be there. It wasn't. The lintel was at your eyebrows. Five foot three, and the whole world is a shelf you can't reach. The goatee itches. The student's phone keeps lighting up with someone named Priya. You wanted a body that walks into rooms and has them rearrange. So the page is open, the wheel is waiting, and your thumb is already on the button.

The wheel turns.

Then the screen cuts to a bright frame and you are sitting up straight in a dark room, a remote set down on the couch arm. Your back is against worn upholstery. Your breath comes slow and wide and heavy. Light moves on your face. Nothing else moves.

The couch gives first. Its nubbed fabric under your palm, the torn spot on the arm where a thumbnail has worried it for years, and then he comes: Gerald, a name said in his mother's mouth, a kitchen with the radio on. The fabric is the first thing he ever owned that was entirely his. He and Dennis bought it secondhand, laughing about the smell. Dennis, the ex-husband, sat at the other end of this exact cushion, feet up in your lap, and you feel the weight of those feet, a warmth, a specific ankle. The ache after is old and smooth, like a stone carried in a pocket.

The sweatshirt is next, navy, soft with washing, tight under the arms. This morning he pulled it over his head in the bedroom and stood a long moment with it at his chest. He is out of work now. The plant closed, thirty-one years of it, and the listings on the laptop at the kitchen table all want someone younger who knows software. He closed the laptop. He did not cry. He put the sweatshirt on because it was the one that did not ask anything of him.

Your right hand wants something. It curls, the thumb flicking, and there is no lighter in it, only the memory of a steel Zippo's lid, the click and the scrape. He quit eleven years ago. His hand never did. Behind the click is a church, a plain one with folding chairs, his voice in a hymn, and the daughter he drove to a Lexington dorm, and her small wave from the curb. You carry that wave in your chest like a swallowed coin.

His knees hurt, a dull gravel ache. His belly rests warm on his thighs. His shoulders are wide and tired, built for lifting things that no longer exist. The creek smell, green and muddy, lives in the room somehow, the footbridge where he walks when the walls get close, the cable humming under his palm.

You look down at the hand. You turn it over. It is thick, creased, and calloused at the base of the fingers, a hand that has held a great deal. You lift your eyes.

"All right, Gerald," you say, low, in a voice like gravel being poured. "Let's see how long you last."