Gregory Allen Moravec

You are standing in a dark kitchen in Chicago, in the body of a nineteen-year-old, and the refrigerator is humming at you like a patient animal.

Colm Nowak's feet ache from twelve minutes of nothing. You don't know his shifts, only that the picking floor has left a tightness in the arches and a clean, stupid strength in the thighs. You open the fridge and drink milk from the carton. His jaw works easily and his stomach has no complaints. There is a cleft in the chin you keep finding with your thumb. He is a good body. Everything in him answers on the first try.

That is the trouble. He answers and there is nothing behind the answering. Everyone in this house is asleep, a mother's cough through a wall, a brother's fan. He is nineteen, and all of that wanting is pointed at a future you have no use for. You are standing in his socks, looking at his phone on the counter, and what you want is a man who has already used up some of his life and kept the receipts.

You open the page. The wheel is a dull color, and it is already turning when you pay.

Then it is Seattle, and you are lying face-down.

There is weight on your ribs, your own weight, a great deal of it, pressed into a mattress. Your breath comes ragged and wet through a mouth open on the pillow. One arm hangs off the edge of the bed, and the blood has gone out of it and is coming back as pins. A thin line of streetlight crosses the dark through a gap in the curtains. Rain is ticking at the window.

You roll. The body does it heavily, with a grunt that is his. The hanging arm swings up on its own, and you fold your hands on your chest and lie there like something laid out. He has never slept like this. You know it the way you know a word in a language you don't speak.

The T-shirt is under your fingers, soft and washed thin, and it gives you the morning he chose it. It is the gray one, last in the drawer, because the others were in the hamper. He stood at the dresser with a child's voice calling from the hall, *Dad, where's my other shoe*. Two sleeves, one at a time, the collar stretched from years of his own pulling. He felt tired and fond, and a little ashamed of the belly he tugged the hem down over.

The sweatpants, navy, drawstring knotted too tight. Under your thumb the cuff has a pulled thread, and the thread brings a kitchen. A woman's back at the stove, his wife, and he is holding a basket of laundry against his hip, saying nothing. He had been thinking of another woman, the recent one, her laugh in a parked car, and he felt it like a splinter he refused to dig out. He chews a toothpick and nobody knows. Your tongue finds one still in the corner of this mouth, splintered soft, and you roll it.

The wedding band is cold and snug on the knuckle. Under it, a hospital: two small cries, two separate winters, his hands shaking each time over a car seat he had read the manual for six times. He loved them with a terrible competence.

Your back is sore, low and left. The knees are older than the man. The scalp is cool where the hair has thinned, and the stubble rasps on the pillow. He is forty-four, soft, strong in the forearms from carrying children, bags and baskets, and the heart beats slowly, steady as a house settling.

You lift your hands into the light from the window and turn them over. They are thick, ordinary and warm, and the ring catches.

You say it to the dark, in a voice that is deeper than you expected: "Okay. Okay, you."

Somewhere above you the rain goes on, and you wonder how long you get this one, and whether the wanting will come back by morning, or by the time the water in the glass beside you goes warm.