Gilbert Tsang

You are standing in a firehouse kitchen in Nashville, in the body of a twenty-year-old who has been yours for less than a minute, and you have already decided.

The freckles are on your forearms, the moustache is on your lip, and the whole house is asleep above you. Nothing is wrong with him. He is strong and quick, and his hands are warm. But the radio on the counter is murmuring a call that isn't yours, the coffee is burnt, and you can feel how much of him is somebody else's plan. Twenty years of being told what he is for. You want one that has already been worn thin and has gone quiet, so you open the page and spin.

Then you are sitting down.

The couch takes your weight in a long soft sag. The room is dark and a screen is moving light across your face, and the remote is loose in your right hand. Something bright cuts across the screen and you sit up straight. You set the remote on the arm of the couch, and your own spine surprises you by cracking.

The cushion is rough suede, worn flat where he always sits. It gives you a Sunday, years back. A small weight is asleep against this same arm, a child with a heavy head, and he did not move for an hour because he was afraid of waking her. Then comes the dull pleasure of a man who knows that he's needed.

The shirt is thin cotton, washed soft, and it gives you the drawer it came from. His wife folds everything in thirds and he never learned to. He pulled it on tonight in the dark without choosing, and the ease of it is a whole marriage. Your left thumb finds the ring and turns it. There is no thought in that, only thirty years of a thumb that checks it is still there.

Your jaw is clenched. You didn't do it, he did. It releases and tightens again, and with it comes the road. A hundred miles of dark highway, a thermos, a rosary swinging from a mirror, and a voice on a phone saying *Papa, when are you home.* Your knees ache. There is a soft give around the middle, a belly that his belt line argued with all day. His feet, in thick socks, remember pedals. A glass on the side table is sweating onto a coaster. Whiskey, a finger or two, his reward for getting home. You can taste it before you've touched it.

The show is still going. A laugh track rolls, and something in you knows that he would have laughed here, a short breath through the nose. You don't, and the room doesn't notice.

You lift your hand off your knee, turn it over, and look at the palm, the gold band, and the gray hair on the knuckles. Then you look up.

"Well," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Hello."

The screen flickers white against the dark. You wonder how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting is already coming back.