Griffin Merrick

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You have been waiting a long time in the place where wishes go, which is not heaven and not anywhere, and you have learned to recognize the ones that are actually offers.

Most of them aren't. Most of them are complaints dressed up. *Let me be taller. Let her call.* Nobody means it. But this one — this one is a door left open with the porch light on.

You watch him first. You always watch first, and this is the part you'd tell no one because it sounds tender and you are not tender: you like looking at people. You have no face and you like faces. His is a good one. Twenty years old, tall in the loose way of somebody who grew into his height last and hasn't caught up with the ends of himself, red hair cut in that hard architecture kids his age wear — long and pushed up on top, then a line, then nothing but clipped bristle on the sides, no blend, no apology, a fence between two ideas. Brown eyes, which surprises you on a redhead. And the dimples. Even when his face is doing nothing his cheeks are creased on both sides like the smile got there early and stayed to hold his place. He can't help it. He could be reading a court order and look like he's about to tell you something funny.

You watch him on a walkway on the second floor of an apartment block off Ferguson Road at three in the afternoon, waiting to be let in. Heat coming up off the concrete. A folder under his arm gone soft at the corners. He knocks. Nobody comes. He knocks again, and then — this is the part you keep — he steps back from the door instead of leaning into it, so whoever's inside can see through the peephole that he isn't crowding them. He waits. He turns something over in his fingers while he waits, a ring, moving it knuckle to knuckle, over and under, over and under. Not a wedding ring. Nothing on his hands. Just a ring he carries, something with a shape, and his fingers work it like a man saying a rosary he doesn't believe in.

Twenty-eight minutes he stands there. She lets him in. He's inside forty minutes and comes out with the folder thicker and his face doing the same thing it always does — that unearned warmth, those two creases — and he sits in his truck in the lot with the AC roaring and doesn't drive anywhere for a while.

You learn the rest of him by watching. He grew up out where the subdivisions eat the prairie, one of those streets where every third house is the same house and the sod is still in seams. Money there. Real money, the quiet kind that doesn't announce — an inheritance that came down through a grandmother and some land under a highway interchange, and it landed on him young and sideways. Somewhere between one and three million dollars sitting in accounts he doesn't look at, and he drives a pickup with a dented tailgate and works a caseload for a salary that wouldn't cover his own property taxes. He tithes. He goes to a church in a converted warehouse where the band is loud and the pastor wears sneakers and he sits in the fourth row and closes his eyes, and you don't know what he says in there but you know his lips move.

Twice a month he drinks too much with the same four people. Someone passes him a vape and he takes it and hands it back and doesn't buy his own. He carries an inhaler in the glove box and one in the folder and one in the jacket, and he uses none of them for weeks at a time and then all of them in one bad February. No girlfriend. No ex who still weighs anything — he mentions no one, calls no one at midnight, keeps no photo turned face-down in a drawer. Single the way a young man is single when he has decided, without saying it, that the wanting can wait.

And still.

You hear the crack in him the way you'd hear a fault in a bell. Every day he goes into rooms where children are being failed and he cannot fix it and he says *ma'am, I'm on your side* with those dimples working against him, because a face like that makes people think he doesn't understand anything. Every day somebody looks at him and sees a kid. Every day he goes home to a house with too many bedrooms and money he didn't earn and prays and does not feel answered. He would never say *I hate my life.* He hasn't got the vocabulary for it; his God doesn't take complaints in that register. So it comes out sideways, and it comes out on a roof.

The roof is above a friend's building in East Dallas. String lights on a wire, big warm bulbs, the only light up there besides the city sitting orange along the bottom of the sky. Everybody else has gone down. He stays with a mug of something in both hands — you notice he holds it in both hands, like it's colder up there than it is — and he tips his head back.

The lights are behind him. His face is lit from below and from the side, and his hair is copper where the bulbs catch it, and those two creases sit in his cheeks doing nothing, meaning nothing, just there, the way a signature is there on a page you didn't read.

And a streak goes over. Small. Quick. The kind you'd miss.

You see it land in his eyes — a white line drawn across each of them, right to left, and gone.

His lips move.

*I wish I was somebody else.*

He doesn't even close his eyes for it. That's how little he means it, or that's how much — you'll never know which and you'll spend years not knowing. He says it the way you'd say a thing you've said in your head nine hundred times and never out loud, testing whether saying it costs anything.

You are faster than his God. That's all it is. You are already here and already listening and already leaning on the door, and the door is open, and the porch light is on, and someone answers.

The streak fades. The bulbs go on swaying on their wire. And you are standing in the middle of a rooftop in East Dallas six feet up off the ground with a mug in both hands and a heart going like a bird in a box.

*Oh.*

The first thing is the weight. Nobody tells you about the weight. Two hundred and some pounds of hydraulic meat hanging off a spine, all of it reporting in at once — heels, hips, the shirt-tag at the back of the neck, a stone in the left shoe, the cooling ring of ceramic against both palms. The heat coming off his own skin. Air going into him. Air going *out* of him, which he was doing without being asked, and which you now have to keep doing on purpose until you learn not to, and for four or five seconds you don't get it right and something whistles at the bottom of the lungs — a narrow sound, an old sound, a hitch you will come to know very well.

And then your head comes down. Slowly. You bring it down off the sky one degree at a time because a neck is a thing that has to be learned, and you look at your hands.

They are not your hands. They are absolutely your hands. Both of these are true and there is nobody left to explain the difference to. Big, loose-jointed, freckled across the backs, the nails cut short and square, a callus at the base of the right forefinger where a pen sits, another along the outside of the palm from a steering wheel gripped at the bottom. Small dry cracks at the knuckles from washing his hands eleven times a day in strangers' kitchens. You turn them over in the dark. Lines. Warmth. A pulse under the thumb like something asking to be let in, which is funny, because you already are.

And then — before you decide to — the right hand goes to the coin pocket and comes out with a ring, and the fingers start turning it. Over, under, over. His hands do that. His hands did that, and they are doing it now, and you are watching them do it, and you will never be certain again which of you started.

He is not in here. You want that on the record because you have wondered. There is no small voice, no knocking. What's here is furniture — a phone code your thumb knows, the shape of Tuesday, the way the tongue expects the word *ma'am*, a warm reflex toward a woman named Deidre who runs the front desk on Ferguson Road. And a low reverence that comes up in you at the sight of a large sky, which is his and not yours and which you cannot put down.

For good. There's no term on this and no way back and you knew that going in, which is why you looked so long before you took it. You have him until this body quits, and then presumably you go back to being nothing, and in between there is a Tuesday, and a Tuesday after that.

You go down the stairwell holding the rail like a man learning stairs. In the truck you find the inhaler in the glove box and hold it up and read the label twice. In the driveway of a new-build subdivision at one in the morning, the pickup ticking behind you, the sod still in seams, you stand under a porch light and breathe experimentally and watch a moth commit itself to the bulb.

Here is what you did not plan for.

You wake at six because he wakes at six. You go in to work because there is a folder on the passenger seat with a child's name on it and the name means nothing to you and everything to the hands. You stand on that walkway in the afternoon heat and knock and step back off the door so she can see you through the peephole, and you do it because that's what these legs do, and then the door opens and a woman looks out at you with her whole life in her face and she says *oh, it's you,* and something in your chest goes over like a car.

Nobody has ever been glad to see you before. You didn't have a face for it.

And you smile — you don't decide to, the equipment just does it — and the two creases go deep in his cheeks, deeper than they sit at rest, and she believes you, and you have not said anything yet that could be believed.

Weeks in you catch yourself in the mirror after a shower, the wet red hair flat and then pushed back up into its shape, that hard line at the temples where long stops and short starts, no blend, a decision made in a barber's chair by somebody who no longer exists. You keep the cut. You go back to the same shop and say *same as before* and the man says *you got it, Griffin,* and you answer to it, and it is your name now, it has been your name for a while.

Twice a month you drink too much with his four friends and one of them holds out a vape and you take it and hand it back. In February you use all three inhalers in one week and sit on the edge of a bed at three in the morning with both hands on your knees learning what he lived with, and you think: *he never once complained about this.* You think it almost fondly. You are learning to be fond of a man who does not exist and whose ring you are turning over in your fingers right now, over, under, over, without having noticed you'd started.

Fourth row, warehouse church, band loud. You close your eyes because the body closes them. You don't say anything. But you listen hard, in case someone is listening back — because if something up there was slower than you that night, it was still up there, and it heard him ask, and it let you get to the door first.

The wish was granted. That's the thing you can't get around. He asked to be someone else and he is, precisely, exactly, without a single word bent: someone else has him. Nobody was cheated. The prayer went through.

You just wish, some afternoons on that walkway with the sun coming up off the concrete and a soft-cornered folder under your arm and a stranger glad through the crack of a door, that you knew where the rest of him went. Whether he got somebody's roof. Whether he's up there in the dark looking at hands, learning them, turning something over.