Greg Vandermeer

You have been Emilio Santana for twenty-two minutes, and the kitchen of his Philadelphia house is dark and humming. The refrigerator talks to itself. His left ear, the cauliflower one, throbs against the cold of the window. His knuckles are split from a job he did Friday, and you keep pressing them to feel it. It is hot and plain and it is his.

It was fine, and that is the trouble. He fit. At five-eight he is low to the ground and quick, and he is proud of how he moves. Then you stood in front of the fridge and reached for the top shelf and didn't have to. There was nothing to reach for. Nothing in him is hungry the way you are. You wanted a body that could hold the ache of wanting, and he is too contented to give you one.

So you open the page. The wheel is already turning, and the hum of the refrigerator goes out of the world.

Blue light on one cheek. Your thumb is mid-scroll, six inches from your face, and it starts again, faster and steadier than it was. It flicks past everything he had stopped on. The room is dark and warm. A sheet is tangled around one leg, and a woman's slow breathing comes from somewhere to your right.

Then the body comes in. It is long. Six feet of him lies curled on one side, and his hip aches against the mattress. His shoulder has gone dull from holding the phone up. His scalp is smooth against the pillow, and his jaw is smooth under your thumb, freshly shaved, with no stubble anywhere. Your knuckles want to crack, so you let them. They pop one by one, loud in the room, and the woman doesn't stir.

The shirt gives him up first. Flannel, soft at the cuffs, the sleeve rolled twice and no further. Four-forty in the morning, a Sunday, long ago: he stood at the closet in the dark and pulled this shirt on over a body that had just stopped being sick. He did the buttons wrong and did them again. His wife, Carol, watched from the bed and said nothing, and he loved her for that. The memory is his and tastes of coffee.

The ring is cool and a little tight, and it brings the rest. He had it re-sized after his hands thickened from the truck. The jeweler was a small man who wore a loupe on his forehead and talked about his daughter. He sat in the chair and cried a little, and he doesn't know why. Then the back step, six in the morning, the cold bar in both fists and the truck lurching. He knows the rhythm of the can, the swing, the slap. He has done it eleven years. He is good, and he knows he is good, and the pay is better than anyone on his street guesses. A pension, overtime, a house paid down. In the bed, his thighs remember the step under them.

The tattoo itches on your forearm. When you rub it with your thumb he is nineteen, in a shop on Fairfax, with a boy who is gone now. A friend. The needle stings in the same place, and the friend laughs, and the ink goes black into the skin.

Under the sheet there is a smell of cedar and laundry soap. Under that is something older, a trace of smoke. He quit eleven years ago and still wants one every night around this hour. That is his hunger. It sits in your throat, small and polite, and it is the first thing in him that feels like yours.

You hold the phone away and look at your hand. The thumb is strange to you. The scar bisects the eyebrow, and you feel it when you frown. You turn the hand over, and the palm is rough, the wedding band catching the light.

You look up. Carol breathes beside you.

"Huh," you say, quietly, to nobody. "Okay."

You have no idea how long this one lasts. Maybe the night. Maybe the want comes back before the coffee does, sharp as a hook, and the page opens again.