Gerald Hanratty

You have watched these films since you were small enough to be told to turn them off. A man wakes in another man's bed. A stranger's reflection says your thoughts. Years of threads at two in the morning, and tonight is nothing much: a dull afternoon, the feed gone stale under your thumb, and a page with a wheel on it that you do not believe in. You pay. You spin. It slows, and it clicks, and it does not apologize.

Cold wet air in a mouth that tastes of whiskey and something sweet gone flat. You are mid-stride, the kerb gone from under your foot, and the body lurches. His hand slaps down on a parked car, cold metal beaded with rain, and you hold yourself there. The scuffing stops. You did that, without knowing how. Your breath is his breath, slow and heavy, and the street swings and settles. Sodium light. Steel shutters. No one anywhere.

The leather jacket hangs open, and when your fingers close on its lapel the smell comes up, old hide and radiator dust, and with it a morning: a coat hook in a hallway, a daughter's voice calling that he'll be late, his own voice saying he won't. Then the shirt, soft blue cotton against your back, and you are in his hands doing the buttons in a bathroom mirror, left cuff, right cuff, the fussy care of a man who irons for people who never look up. A desk outside a corner office. Thirty years of bringing coffee and saying he'll check the calendar. The pride in it, and under the pride a small dull coal he never names.

The khakis are damp at the hem. His knees ache in the cold. The belly is soft over the belt, the legs too long and thin beneath it, a body that was tall for a different life. In his pocket your knuckles find a ring of keys, and the brass is warm. A kitchen, years ago, a woman's back at the sink, a silence that went on all through the dishes. He has been walking the long way home for a year so as not to arrive in rooms like that one. The sweet taste in his mouth was the third drink, the one he calls the last.

Your thumb finds the pale bare band on his ring finger and presses it. A flash, sudden and not yours: two small kids on a Saturday, a fistful of dandelions held up to him, and the ache of it is so large your eyes sting. Church basement coffee. A hymn he still hums. Twenty-five thousand and some, saved in a drawer of numbers he checks when he cannot sleep.

You lift your hands into the sodium light and turn them over. They are long, and they are steady now. You look up at the dark street.

"Left," you say, to nobody. "Let's see what's left."

And underneath it, the question you cannot answer: how long this one is yours, and when the wanting comes back.