Glenn Fontenot

The screen is too bright for this hour, and that's the first thing you notice — not guilt, not nerves, just the glare of it against a dark room that hasn't had its day start yet. Tuesday, early, nothing in front of you but hours. You found the site at two different points of the same restless year, closed the tab twice, told yourself it was a joke like all the others. Third time you didn't close it. You have wanted this since before you had a word for wanting it — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every late thread where people argued about whether it would feel like falling or like being poured. You never thought it would be real, and then there was a wheel on a page, spinning under your thumb, and it did not ask you anything twice. You paid. You spun. It did not warn you.

Glenn is mid-blink on a frozen rectangle of video when you arrive, and the other half of that blink never finishes, because now you are the one looking out at it. You are sitting. You are heavier in the chair than you expected to be, weight settled low in the gut, a soreness already old in both knees before you've even tried to stand. The lamp is warm gold on one side of a kitchen table and the window behind it is that flat dusk-blue that means the day already happened somewhere and finished without you. Habit — his habit, not yours yet, but already moving your jaw — has something small and dry caught between back teeth. A toothpick. You didn't put it there. The timer on the dead window keeps climbing, red numbers, like it's still waiting for somebody to say something. So you sit up, dead center in the little camera eye, and you say hello into a face that can't hear you, testing a voice you've never used before, surprised by how far down in the chest it sits.

Then the shirt. Flannel, soft from washing, snug at the gut where it buttons — and touching it is like touching a doorknob with a shock behind it: a Monday morning, this same shirt coming off a hook by a bathroom mirror, Glenn's hands buttoning it one-handed while he balanced a coffee mug on the sink, thinking about nothing, thinking about a nine a.m. call he didn't want, a thought skating by about whether the blue tie was clean. The memory isn't yours. It arrives with his boredom already inside it, his particular flavor of tired, a thirty-seven-year-old tired that lives behind the eyes and in the lower back.

The table under your forearms gives you more: years of leaning on it with a laptop, a different window glowing, a different year — a woman's voice on the other end of a call that was not an app being tried for fun but a custody conversation, careful and over-polite, both of them performing calm for the sake of a kid who wasn't even in the room. That was the marriage ending without ever once raising its voice, which was somehow worse. You feel, briefly, exactly how much he loved her before he stopped, and how long after stopping he still signed his texts with her name's first letter because the habit never broke even after the rest did.

The floor under your feet gives you a glass conference room, a wall of bar charts behind him, his own voice going easy and warm in a way that cost him something every single time, because the easiness was a tool he'd built, not a thing he woke up with. Sales numbers up and down like weather. A good month felt like nothing. A bad one sat on his chest at 3 a.m.

The toothpick between your teeth gives you the years since the cigarettes — the specific itch of quitting, replaced by this, a small wooden stand-in he's never once thought about, the way your tongue is already finding the groove worn into it without being told to.

Your left hand finds the ring — gone now, just a ghost dent in the skin — and under it comes a single whole evening: his daughter at nine years old laughing so hard at something he'd said that she'd had to put her fork down, and the unbearable sweetness of being, for one hour, the funniest man alive to somebody. That one you let run long, because it is good, and because nobody told you the good ones had to be short.

Then it eases, the way a held breath does, and you are only sitting at a table in a shotgun house in New Orleans, heavy and warm and real, the air smelling like someone else's dinner three houses down, the night outside the window soft and wet-sounding though you can't hear rain.

You lift your hands off the table and turn them over in the lamp light — thick fingers, a white hairline dent where a ring used to sit, a hangnail he'd meant to deal with and never did. Not your hands. His, and yours now, with no road back to whoever held the ones you had before this.

You look up into the little dark camera eye like it's the only witness that matters, and you say, quiet, almost to yourself: "Glenn's not here anymore. But I am."