Gregory Alan Pohlman

You are standing at a register that is not yours, in the body of a man who stocks shelves, and the day is going out of him the way it always does, from the knees up. Anthony Raymond Verrilli has been yours for two minutes. His back already aches. His thumb is split along the nail from a box cutter. The store smells of cardboard and floor wax, and the song over the speakers is one he has heard nine hundred times and still hums along to.

That is the trouble. He hums. He is content. There is a good, narrow life in him, and you stand in the middle of it feeling like a guest who has eaten the whole meal and is still hungry. You are not tired of him. You are tired of being handed things. Nothing in this body has ever wanted anything you could not already see from the loading dock.

So you step out past the carts, into the cold blue of the evening, and you do not wait. You spin.

The floor goes out from under the hum.

Heat on your right hand. A sock, thick with it. You are crouched low, knees folded, the dryer's open mouth breathing at your face, and a fluorescent tube is buzzing somewhere overhead like a held note. Your thighs burn. Your breath comes short against a belly that presses your own ribs. The air is lint and detergent and cold concrete.

You pull the load out in one armful and drop it into the basket. It is warm. It smells like someone's whole week.

Then the clothes begin to talk. The hoodie, soft and gone thin at the cuffs, gives you this morning before you ask: his arms going into the sleeves, one then the other, the zipper dragging up over a belly he has stopped apologizing to. The cargo pants come next, the knees stained from the garage. His hands remember the belt without you, the notch worn pale. The boots are heavy, lace ends gone fuzzy. He tied them standing, one foot on the bench, grunting.

The sock in your hand is black and has a hole starting at the heel. A flash: a woman's voice upstairs, laughing, saying he would wear them to the grave. Warmth, an old easy joke. He loved her in that second. It arrives in your chest like a swallowed coal, and it is not yours.

Your thumb finds the ring on your left hand and turns it. Behind it comes a kitchen, two kids arguing over a cereal bowl, and under that, quieter, an ex-wife's name written on a school form. A decent ending, he thinks, mostly. He sent the check on time. He keeps it fair.

You straighten your fingers on the warm cotton and they know the work. Corners meet, edges square, a shirt becomes a flat clean thing in three motions. He was good at this because he was good at tolerances, at things fitting. A caliper's weight sits in your palm that is not there. A machine half built on a bench, a gearbox that would not seat for two weeks, and the particular joy when it finally did, alone in the lab after everyone left. Nobody knows he cried a little. Not sad. Just fit.

The neck itches where the birthmark is. A schoolyard comes up, a boy's finger pointing, and then a long adult peace made with it. He barely sees it now. He had forgotten it was there until you touched it.

The tube hums on. A snowmobile waits somewhere under a tarp. The windows are going amber.

You look at your hands. They are broad and warm, one ringed, lint in the creases. You turn them over.

You lift your eyes to the dark window glass, to a stranger's brown eyes in a stranger's goatee, and you say quietly, "All right. Let's see how long you let me."

Upstairs a door opens. You do not know yet how long this lasts, or when the wanting comes back.