Harlan Pruett

You are standing in a stockroom in Boston at the middle of the night, in Patrick Donnelly, and you are counting the same box of phone chargers for the third time. Seven minutes. That's how long you've been him. His keys are heavy in his pocket and the lanyard smells of someone else's coffee. You've found nothing wrong with him. Something that happened in the first minutes sent you back: his phone lit on the shelf and the name on it was a woman's, and you realized you would have to answer to it, to stand in his kitchen and be forgiven for things you never did. You didn't want to be known. You wanted to be a stranger in somebody who had no one waiting. You put the box down and open the page.

The wheel turns. You feel the click all the way down.

Then the weight changes. Your breath, which was ragged, goes even in one long pull. Your arm, hanging off the edge of a mattress, draws itself up on its own, and you roll onto your back and fold your hands at your chest. There is a gap in the curtains and a streetlight standing in it. You are warm. You are enormous. Six foot one of man lies along a bed that is too short for him.

The sheets are first. Cotton, worn thin, rucked under your hip, and they give you a woman laughing in this room with her feet against his shins, saying his name like a question. Not a wife. A girlfriend, still new enough that he washes the sheets before she comes. Under the pillow your knuckles find the cool of his phone, and with it comes the dread of an old number he hasn't deleted. An ex. He doesn't call it. He keeps it the way you keep a stone in a pocket.

The shirt isn't on you; the gray sleeves of something soft are, and the cuffs are tight at the wrists. But the other shirt, the pale work shirt hanging on the chair, comes anyway through the smell of cut grass in the room. Cuff, then cuff, the sleeves rolled twice. Button by button at five in the morning, the pocket where he keeps a pencil. The trousers stiff with green at the knees from kneeling at the bases. The boots laced in the dark, left, then right, a double knot because of the dew.

Your tongue finds the back of his teeth and the old craving of a man who quit cigarettes, a hollow that comes at dusk and has never fully left. He has never had a drink. A rug beside the bed, a thing he kneels on five times a day, rolled against the wall; his forehead remembers the nap of it. Prayer is the one place in his life that nobody has ever asked him to explain.

The beard lies across your chest, long and coarse, and his fingers know it, combing it flat when he is thinking. The cheek with the mole itches, and you know without a mirror where it is. His lower back aches in the old way of mowers and ladders. His thighs are strong. His hands remember the push of a mower handle, the long stripe, the turn at the foul pole, the stands empty and the grass wet and a creek somewhere beyond the fence, and a cable footbridge that sways under his boots in green shade over brown water. He crosses it every morning and holds the cable, and it hums.

He has almost nothing. A truck, a rented house, and a field he keeps better than anyone has ever asked him to. It is enough. He would have said so.

You lift your hands over your face in the streetlight. Calluses, split nails, and gray hair on the backs of the fingers. You turn them over. Yours.

"Well," you say, in a voice with gravel and hills in it. "Hello, Harlan."

The ceiling doesn't answer. You wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back.