Gregory Hallahan

You are leaving Curtis Bellamy's body after two minutes, and the reason is the thing it did while you stood in the cab with the engine ticking. A phone rang on the dash. A woman's name, and his hand went to it, and the hand knew the name and you did not. It answered for you. It said "hey, baby" in a voice that was warm all the way down, and you listened to your own mouth be loved by someone. You said nothing true. You hung up and sat there with the freckles on the backs of the knuckles. That is all. You paid again.

The wheel stops.

A drawer edge under your fingertips, paper, a folder tab, and you are standing. The glass in front of you holds a whole city going blue, and your hands were already moving. They filed one wrong. You feel the wrongness in the wrist, a half-second stumble in a motion that has been made ten thousand times. You pull the folder out and slide it home again slowly, and then the next, and the next, each one checked, as if the job had ever needed it.

The shirt on your back is the first to speak. Cotton, pressed, a little stiff at the shoulders. A morning comes up through the fabric: a bedroom, a wife's back turned in the half dark, his own fingers working the buttons from the bottom, the left cuff, the right, folding each twice to the forearm because he thinks better with his arms free. He stood a moment at the mirror and was satisfied, and the satisfaction is a warm coin in your chest that is not yours.

The folders under your fingers open another. Paper edges, the dry smell of manila. A night of numbers, a layoff list he signed and then did not sleep after. The weight of it sits in the jaw. Then a daughter, small, asleep against this exact shoulder in a car, the seatbelt click, the drive down a steep driveway into cold white garage light, and the engine off, and him sitting there one extra minute so she would not wake.

The body underneath: tall, a long back that has learned to hold itself, thick forearms, a knee that complains faintly when you shift your weight. Your breath goes deep and easy. The glasses in the pocket press against the chest. The hair stands up high and stiff above your forehead, and you can feel the air on a jaw shaved smooth.

Your thumb has found the ring. It turns it, round and round, without asking you. And that opens the last one: a church basement, folding chairs, coffee, a number of days he said aloud once, a hand on his shoulder. Nobody at work knows. His wife does.

You lift your hand and look at it. Silver hair on the wrist, a plain band, a watch ticking against the bone. You turn it over. You look up at the glass, at the man standing in it, and say, quietly, "Well. Hello."

The lights keep coming on across the city. You wonder how long before you want something else.