Gordon Whitlow Hale

You are Owen Pelkey, and Owen Pelkey is standing in a dark kitchen in Maine with the refrigerator humming and his own freckled thumb resting on a phone. The tile is cold under his feet. Ten days and twenty-three hours, and the body still works. It climbs towers and takes the wind in its beard. Today it came down off a blade, took off a glove, and could not feel the cold the way it used to. A small thing, a numbness at the tips, and you stood on the platform with a hundred feet of air under you and knew exactly how far this one could go. It is the kind of thing nobody would forgive you for wanting to leave behind. You open the page. The wheel is already turning. You do not say why. You press.

Streetlight through a gap in the curtains. Your breath, which was ragged, goes even in one pull. Your hanging arm draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. You have never slept that way, and neither has he. The sheets are cool and tangled at the knees.

The first thing you touch is the cotton of his shirt, worn soft at the collar. A morning comes up through it: his hands doing the buttons in a bathroom mirror, the left cuff first, a wife's voice down the hall asking whether he has eaten. He had not. He felt guilty about it, and then he felt nothing, the way he always did before the building.

The pillow under your skull smells of someone else's shampoo and his own sleep. A corner office at dusk comes back, the whole city lit behind glass, and a board that went quiet when he spoke. Pride, then the old tiredness under it. Your thumb finds the band on your left hand and turns it. A church basement. Folding chairs. A hymn he does not sing well and sings anyway. A daughter on his shoulders, tiny, in a coat too big for her, and the weight of her skull against his bald head.

Your right thumb goes to the inside of your left forearm, and the lettering there is raised under the pad. A name. A date. You do not read it. The ache that comes with it is his, an old one, and it is not yours to name. Then the pipe: cherry tobacco on a stoop at first sun, marble steps worn hollow under his shoes, a glass of something amber after. His hand goes to his face without being told, rubbing the smooth jaw, the way it does when he is afraid of a number.

The body is sixty and compact, and the knees ache slightly, hot and dull. The chest is strong. The lungs hold a little tar. Everything here is steadier than Owen, and slower.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over.

"Hello," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected. Down the hall a floorboard settles. How long does this one last, and when does the wanting come back?