Gregory Passarella

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Five minutes in a mail carrier's body and already you know it isn't the one. The route calluses on his palms are new to you, the unibrow you keep catching in the hallway mirror is wrong on your face, and outside his window Philadelphia is doing nothing, the whole street asleep, porch lights off, a dog barking twice somewhere and giving up. You sit on the edge of his bed in his boxers with his phone light on your face at whatever small hour this is, and you feel it start again — not boredom exactly, something closer to hunger with better manners. Five hundred and sixty-five men behind you and this one already filed under *fine*, already filed under *not him*. You open vessel.cards because that's what your hands do now, the way his hands click a pen he doesn't carry and yours has picked up like a tell. You pay. You spin.

—

The dryer's still ticking heat against your knees when you land, crouched, one white sock heavy and warm in your fist. Fluorescent light overhead with a hum in it like a held note. Concrete floor cold through the knees of somebody's sweatpants. You are enormous compared to a second ago — wide through the shoulders, a gut with muscle under it, boots planted wrong for your old balance, and for one full second you are only weight, learning it, the way water learns a glass.

Then the sock. Static-warm, worn thin at the heel, and it comes in through your fingers before you've decided to let it: a hundred Sunday nights of this exact crouch, this exact hum, whites in one load, everything else jammed together because separating colors always felt like something his mother would have done and mattered to nobody else. You are Gregory Passarella and you have folded laundry for fifteen years the way you grade papers, corners squared, no half measures, because a thing done halfway itches at you worse than not doing it at all.

The shirt on your back — this one, chambray, the sleeve with a chalk smear that never quite came out — brings the morning whole: standing in front of the closet at some hour that isn't quite morning, picking it because it was clean and because blue doesn't show sweat under the arms by third period. Lanyard next, cool plastic tapping your sternum, laminate photo of a face you now know from the inside. You teach eighth grade social studies at a school two buses' worth of kids feed into, and you are good at it in the specific tired way of someone who has stopped needing to be told so. Empty classroom after last bell, chairs shoved crooked, chalk dust in the light — that room comes back gray and long and full of a particular quiet you like more than you'd admit to anyone at the diocese picnic.

Boots on concrete: you built this. Not the house — you rent the upstairs, share the basement laundry with the Kowalczyks below — but the habit, the Saturday-night wash so Monday's shirts are ready, learned from watching your father do the same thing in a colder basement in Bloomfield, cigar smoke curling up past a bare bulb while he folded towels like he was squaring away a flag. You quit drinking three years ago without telling anyone it was a decision, just stopped ordering the second one, then the first. Cigars you kept. Your father's, then yours. The mole on your cheek is his mother's mole, is your mole now, is the one thing people say when they describe you to someone who's never met you.

No one describes you to anyone lately. Thirty-six, single, no complications, a modest number sitting quiet in a savings account you don't check often enough. The apnea mask waits upstairs by the bed like a held breath of its own. You know this body's aches now too — the low back that complains on wet-leaf mornings, the knees that don't love the crouch you're in, the forearms that are stronger than they look under the sleeve. Good hands. Hands that know a stapler, a whiteboard marker, the particular fold that makes a fitted sheet behave.

You pull the load out warm, drop it in the basket, and your hands — his hands, now the only hands you have — start folding before you've told them to, fast, exact, corners meeting corners, nothing like whatever the last man kept crumpled in a drawer he never fully closed.

You look down at them. Wide, weathered, a callus at the base of the thumb you don't remember earning. You turn one over like it might have something written on the other side.

You lift your eyes into the hum of the fluorescent tube, into whatever is watching, and you say, out loud, to no one in the empty basement:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."