Gerald Trumbauer

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It is late and you are not tired, which is the whole problem with the last year of your life. The scroll has gone past the point of entertainment into something closer to penance, and then your thumb stops on a page that is not trying very hard to look like anything: white background, a wheel, a price. vessel.cards. You have wanted this since before you knew there was a word for it — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every thread you read at hours like this one and told no one about. You did not think it would work. You pay anyway, because the cost of being wrong is nothing, and you spin, because the cost of being right is a thing you have wanted your whole life and never had a shape for.

The wheel does not spin so much as it stops, instantly, the way a dream decides where you are.

You are on your knees. Carpet, not soft, pressing its weave into kneecaps that ache in a way that is not yours but you feel anyway, already, before you have a name for whose ache it is. Your hands are together low in front of you, loosely, the fingers of a man who stopped really meaning it three sentences ago. There is a nightstand an inch from your face with a clock on it, analog, the kind with a brass bell on top, and the number on it makes no sense against the light in the room — late morning light, flat and gray-gold through a window — until the wrongness just sits there, unresolved, because somewhere behind you it is the middle of the night and everyone is asleep and none of that matters here, where it is a Monday and nearly noon and a man your age is on his knees in a t-shirt for reasons that have nothing to do with a clock.

You were getting to the amen early. Some reflex coming up through the knees says *get up*, halfway laughing at yourself already, this half-serious little ritual you do most days now and don't examine — and the rising catches, stutters, and you go back down onto both knees instead, forehead finding the bedspread, and that is where I am when I arrive, mid-correction, in a body that was already changing its mind about standing.

The bedspread against your forehead is the first key. It smells like the inside of a dryer and faintly like a woman's shampoo that stopped being bought years ago but the smell stayed anyway, worked into the seams of things, into the mattress, into a life. A flash: this room with someone else's coat still on the hook by the door for months after she took everything else. Another: her name almost arriving and sliding past, because grief here is specific but the facts of her are guarded even from you — only that she is the one who got away, that there was a divorce, that some part of this man still kneels sometimes and says something like a prayer that is really just her name worded differently so God doesn't notice it's not about Him.

The t-shirt against your back, thin cotton, worn to softness — a morning memory comes with it, vivid and small: pulling this exact shirt over his head an hour or two ago, the ring finger catching on the collar the way it always does now, a thin pale band of skin where fourteen years of a ring used to sit, a groove the finger hasn't forgotten even though the metal's long gone, sold or pawned or just put away somewhere he doesn't open. The thumb and first finger of your right hand twitch toward your jaw without being told to — stubble there, two days of it, gray and short, and the hand knows this gesture the way hands know doorknobs, touches the jaw, the cheek, checks something that isn't there to check. It has done this ten thousand times. It is not nervousness exactly. It is just where the hand goes when the mind leaves the room.

More comes, loose, out of order, the way a life comes when nobody is curating it for you. A metal taste under the tongue from coffee gone lukewarm on the porch rail an hour before this, mid-morning, most days, mug in two hands, looking at a street that is wet even when it isn't raining because this city never quite dries. A number that lives behind his sternum like a stone, money gone the way money goes when you're not paying close enough attention for long enough years — a hole he doesn't total anymore because totaling it doesn't fix it, just a low tax on every good moment, paid without being asked. A vape pen in a jacket pocket somewhere in this house, the pull of it, menthol, a habit he started when the smoking ban made him feel virtuous for trading down. A thin ring of metal at your nose that your fingers find without meaning to, cool, small, something he got when he was sixty and thought, why not, nobody left to tell me no.

And her. Longer than any of it, because the hands keep finding the places that lead back to her. Not the end — the middle, the good unremarkable middle, a kitchen in a different house, her laugh at something stupid he said on purpose to hear it, a Sunday where church was a formality they half-believed and fully enjoyed because they did it together, mainline and unbothered, coffee after in paper cups on the church lawn. He was not praying tonight about God. He was negotiating, badly, with an absence shaped like her, getting to the amen too fast because some nights he can't stand being that honest for the whole length of the prayer.

The knees are still down. The forehead is still against the bedspread. No time has passed that a clock would notice.

You lift your head. You bring your hands up in front of your face — his hands, long-fingered, a thin tan line ringing the base of the left ring finger like a scar that never broke skin — and you turn them over slowly, both sides, the way you'd check a thing you bought that might be damaged.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in his voice, and it comes out almost amused. "Okay."