Gordon Pratt

You are in the janitor's body for less than a minute, and already you know why you are leaving it. It is the middle of the night in Pittsburgh. The house is asleep around you, a stranger's house that you are standing in, and the kitchen linoleum is cold through the socks. You came down for water. Then you saw your reflection in the dark window over the sink: the shaved head, the beauty mark, the skinny shoulders. You looked like a man waiting to be told what he was for.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He works, he walks, and he has a mother's phone number taped inside a cabinet. You stand there with a glass of water and feel the wanting come up the way it always does, the same as hunger. It has nothing to do with him. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you pay.

The kitchen goes, and there is carpet under your knees.

You are kneeling at the edge of a bed, and a laugh is still in your chest, half out. Your forehead is going down to the bedspread, and the weight of it surprises you. The man's body is short and dense and heavy through the thighs and shoulders. The smile is gone off your face mid-breath, and you did not take it off. A lamp is on. A clock on the nightstand says 3:14 in red.

The bedspread is rough against your forehead, and with it comes a flash that is his feeling, not yours. You are small, in a pew, in a scratchy collar, with your mother's thumb pressing the back of your neck. *Sit.* The shame of it is so old it has no edges. He was never a serious man about this. He prays the way a person checks a lock, because his mother did. Amen early, always, half a joke between him and God.

The shirt is on your back, soft from washing, and it gives you the morning. His hands rolling the cuffs on the black work shirt, left and then right, two turns each, forearms thick and sun-browned. He fastens the buttons from the bottom up because that is how his wife once teased him into it. A bar rag goes over the shoulder because there is nowhere else for it. That was yesterday. Tonight is the t-shirt, and the t-shirt remembers nothing but sleep.

Your fingers move on their own and find the ring. It is plain and warm, worn thin on the underside. Memory comes hard: a woman on a porch, laughing with her whole face, saying *you're short, Gordie, I don't care*, and then a hospital hallway three times over, three small heads, three sets of lungs shouting. His wife is the long shape in the bed beside you, breathing. You don't turn. You can feel him loving her the way you feel a floor.

Your knees ache. The left one clicks. The scalp at your crown prickles in the lamp's heat when you touch it, thin hair, bare skin. Your jaw hurts under the chinstrap beard. Your back has the lifetime of cases of limes and kegs rolled, and under the pain is strength: shoulders that could lift you off the carpet without asking.

Then the drawer. Your hand drifts to the nightstand and a cigar band is there, and in a flash it is a gravel yard, saguaros black against white afternoon, and him alone with a smoke he shouldn't have. He is thinking about an old girlfriend, a name he will never say aloud. He is only wondering what her life became. He feels no wanting in it. It is a small private room he keeps, and nobody has ever walked in. You do, and you stop, and you leave it as it was.

Savings: the number comes up warm and exact, a little put away, a kitchen-table worry turned into a comfort.

You push up off the bed and stand. Your hands are in front of you. They are broad, scarred nowhere, the ring on the left. You turn them over. They are not yours, and they are not anyone's now but yours.

You look up at the dark window, where a short man in a t-shirt looks back with green eyes.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Hello, Gordon."

The clock turns to 3:15. Somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep, and you do not know for how long.