Glenn Sorensen

You are standing in a driveway in Small-town Ohio, in Terrence Whitfield's body, and your thumb is going back and forth over the screen of his phone. His dimples are doing something at the corners of his mouth without you. You have been him for less than a minute. The delivery van ticks behind you as it cools. The goatee itches. You have already learned that the knees are good and the left shoulder is not, and that he hums when he is happy and has just stopped. None of that is why you are here. A package is in the crook of his arm, a small one, a child's name on the label, and the weight of it should have been enough. A porch light is on in the afternoon. A woman's shape moves behind the storm door, and some part of him lifts toward it like a hand. You do not want to be lifted. You want to be a stranger in a stranger. You press the button.

Then the weight is wrong, and it is lower and softer. You are lying back, and the chair gives under you in a long hydraulic sigh. Your jaw is rough. Your mouth tastes of plastic and coffee gone cold. Light is lying across your face, a bar of it, hot as a hand. You were turned away from it, and now you are turned into it, and your eyes are open, and you do not blink. The glare goes white and then slowly into a room.

The first thing you touch is the shirt, a thin gray T-shirt, soft from a thousand washings. His hand has been resting on it, and the cotton hands you a morning, though not this one. It is the night before. He stands in a bathroom with the door shut, pulling this shirt over his head, careful, because a child is asleep in the next room on his weekend. The three of them sleep in a row, the youngest on the floor on a camping mat because she insists. He folds the shirt in thirds, the way his mother did.

Your fingers move and find the ring finger of the left hand. There is a band of pale skin there, smooth, narrower than the rest. The thumb goes to it without being told, rubbing the bare place, and the whole thing comes up through it. It is a kitchen, years ago. Her name is Marisol, and the ring comes off in the car because the finger has swollen from the heat and the plastic on the line, and she says nothing, which is worse. He keeps the ring in a drawer. He prays about it, kneeling on the bathroom tile with his forehead on the edge of the tub. He never drank, not once, not even the night she left. He drove to church instead and sat in the lot until the lights went out.

Your teeth find the thumbnail. It is already ragged, already bitten to the pink. You taste the faint salt of it and the machine oil under it, and a flash arrives with it: the extrusion line at three in the morning, the plastic spooling out warm and endless, a pale rope he guides with gloves that smell of rubber and heat. He counts the feet. He counts everything. Two kids need braces, and one needs a lawyer's letter answered. His bank balance sits in him like a stone: a number under five thousand that he checks and checks.

The work trousers are stiff at the knee, and the denim rubs the back of the thighs when you shift. The morning he put them on was yesterday's evening. The left leg first, then the right, boots by the door, a thermos filled. He kissed no one. The apartment was quiet. He stood on the balcony a moment where the neon from the street lay on the wet tile like spilled color, and the ocean haze made the night soft, and he said a short prayer, for the kids, for her, for his back. His back hurts now. A hot wire runs low along the spine from a long shift on his feet, and the calves ache, and under that is a bone-deep tiredness you could drown in. His hands are strong, with a grip that knows how to hold a line steady without being told.

A corner of the foil crackles in the window. You do not look away from it.

You lift your hand, the left one, and hold it in the light. Freckles run down the wrist and over the knuckles. The tan line is a pale ring. You turn it over, the palm callused and creased, the nails chewed. Then you raise your eyes, and you say, in a voice lower and slower than you expected, "Well. Good morning, Glenn."

The foil flutters. Somewhere under the quiet you already feel the old wanting, small, patient, a thread pulled very slightly tight. You do not know how long this lasts, or whether the light will find you here tomorrow.