Gregory Hanlon

You are standing in a kitchen in Seattle, in the dark, with the refrigerator open and its light on your shins. The body is short and dense, and it is still holding a carton of milk you do not want. Esteban Cordero. Fifty-five minutes. The soldier's boots are by the door, and his sergeant's text sits unanswered on the counter. None of that is why you are here.

It is the doorframe. He cannot reach the top shelf, and in the last hour you have stood on a chair twice, and the second time a child's drawing slid out from behind the cereal. A girl in crayon, a man with a rifle and a very large smile. You held it too long. He would have known what to do with it. You do not, and you have noticed that you would like to be the kind of body that does not have to.

You put the milk down. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Cold, then nothing, then weight.

Your face is in a pillow that smells of someone's detergent and your own breath. Your right arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone out of it. Your heart is slowing from a gallop. Your breath goes even in one pull, and you feel the body hand over its panic like a coat.

The arm comes up by itself, because you ask it to. You roll onto your back. A long body, six feet of it, and the mattress gives under shoulders that were built by something, years of something. Your hands fold on your chest. A streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your wrist.

The sheet under your fingers is cotton, worn soft, and it opens: a woman's laugh, low, in this bed, a Sunday, his gladness, plain as bread. Then the band on your left hand, cool metal, and you turn it with your thumb. Eleven years. A hotel in Monterey. He had cried and been embarrassed. The ring is loose in the cold and tight in the heat.

Your right leg is bouncing under the blanket. You did not tell it to. It has bounced through every meeting he has ever sat in, and you feel the nerves it spends, the quota, the glass room, the wall of charts behind him, forty people watching a line go up or not.

The crooked nose, when you touch it, gives you a ball in a driveway at fourteen and a brother's elbow, the white flash, the taste of pennies. Your fingers find the bump on the bridge and he is almost proud of it.

The T-shirt on your ribs is gray cotton and thin. He put it on in the bathroom tonight, mouth tasting of wine, and stood a moment at the sink with the light cold and white. The recent ex-girlfriend arrives through that shirt, the one he should not have texted, a message typed and not sent, the guilt like a stone in a shoe. He does not want her. He wants to have been wanted. You hold that and put it down carefully.

Two children breathe somewhere below you, in the house under the bay window, and your chest answers with a hard tenderness you did not earn. Your jaw is smooth. Your knees ache a little. The carpet, when your foot finds the floor, is cold.

You lift your hand into the streetlight and turn it over. Broad knuckles, a pale band, a man's palm that has shaken ten thousand hands.

You look up and say, quietly, "Hello, Gregory."

The leg keeps bouncing. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back.