Gerald Philip Moynihan

You are standing in Atlanta at three in the morning, in a man who has been yours for less than a minute. Caleb's kitchen is dark and the tile is cold under your bare feet. The refrigerator hums. His beard is rough under your palm, and the pale patches on the backs of his hands show in the light from the stove clock. Somewhere down the hall his people are asleep. You have not met any of them, and you will not.

He works. He is a good manager, and the body is a good body, quick and easy to read. But you stood at the pass an hour ago and watched the line cooks plate a dish you had no feeling for, and you noticed that you could not taste anything. Everything you took from him was borrowed. A man handed you a bill and thanked you, and you nodded as if it were your name. Nothing in it was yours, and you did not want it.

The wanting has come back again, as it always does. It is very small, a thumbnail pressing at the inside of your chest. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are on your knees.

The carpet is rough under both kneecaps. The bedspread is against your forehead, and your breath comes in half a laugh that is not yours yet. A clock glows red at the edge of your eye. Your knees ache the way knees ache at forty-seven, with a deep, old, specific complaint.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, soft from washing, hanging loose on the belly. You feel it at the shoulders and at the ribs, and then you feel him pulling it on this morning in the dark. He sat on the edge of the bed with his feet on the cold floor. His wife turned over and said something into the pillow. Her voice is warm, and it passes through you like a held note. He pulled the sleeve over his left wrist and the ring caught on the cuff. He worked it free without looking, because he has done it ten thousand times.

Your jaw is moving. A piece of gum is soft and tasteless in your cheek, and your teeth chew it without being asked. Under it is the smoothness of a fresh shave and the dent of the cleft in your chin. Your tongue finds it. A flash comes of a bathroom, a razor, and his own face in the mirror. He is tired of that face, and fond of it too, the way you are fond of a chair.

You press your hands flat on the bedspread. The fabric is worn, with a little pilling, and it gives you a memory whole. A Sunday, a pew, hard wood against his back, and the two children kicking each other's shoes. His wife's hand is on his knee. The hymn is one he half knows. He mouths it. He believes in it a little and not very much, and he finds that enough. That is why he prays like this, half joking, to a clock.

The ring is on your left hand. When you turn it, the gold is warm and slightly loose. It brings you a rented hall and the smell of lilies. It also brings a woman from before, who is not his wife. She is a name on a phone he never calls, and the feeling is a bruise he presses sometimes to see if it still hurts. It does, faintly.

You breathe. A vape sits in the nightstand drawer, and your hand knows exactly where. A cigarette is outside behind the garage. He has stopped drinking, and his stomach is calm and clean on that account. Two monitors wait in the other room, and the code on them is his and fluent. Money sits somewhere in accounts he does not think about much. It is more than he ever expected to have, and he is faintly embarrassed by it.

Your heart is slow and heavy. The weight of the body sits low and settled, and the knees complain. You are strong in the thighs and the back, from years of carrying.

Now you lift your head. You turn your hands over in the lamplight, thick fingers and a plain band, and you look at them for a long moment. Then you look up at the clock, red numbers in the dark.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is deeper than you expected. "Amen."

The house stays quiet. The wanting is already there, small and patient, under his ribs. You wonder how long this one will last, and whether you will still be him in the morning.