Howard Lindahl

You are standing in a kitchen in Philadelphia, in the body of a man named Patrick Gallagher, and you have been him for less than a minute. His knuckles are still stiff from some argument he had with a door. You are holding his coffee and it is already good, and that is the trouble. It works. The knees work, the shoulders work, and nothing in him is wrong. You find you don't want a body that works. You want to be surprised by one. So you put the cup down on his counter, not hard, and you open the page with the wheel on it, and you pay.

The wheel clicks around and slows.

Then you are standing, mid-sentence, with a phone cradled against your shoulder and your mouth open on a word. Your right hand is out in the air, palm up, offering something to nobody. Your left hand has just done something wrong on the desk. It reached for the wrong phone, so you set it right, slowly, and then you check the next one, and the next. Ten small motions, each one watched. Your body doesn't know why you are watching. The voice in the receiver is still talking about a position.

Light comes in low and amber through the window, and outside a snowmobile sits under a blue tarp against a wall of plywood. It is the middle of the morning, and the market has been open for hours. The screens on your left glow with numbers. You don't understand them yet.

The shirt moves against your back first. Pinstripe cotton, and under it a sleeve he buttoned this morning at the edge of a bed, left cuff first, because the right one is harder. You feel him do it, the careful thumb, and a feeling comes with it that isn't yours. It is the dull steadiness of a man getting through the day. The suspenders pull at your shoulders. He clipped them on in a hallway, a child's backpack lying by the door, and a small voice said something about snow. The word *Dad* sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. There is one child. You don't get the face, only the weight of it.

The tie is knitted and cool. Your thumb finds the ring on your left hand, and nothing comes. It isn't a wedding ring, you realize, only a habit. Under it is a girlfriend's laugh in a car, and another woman's key set down on a table, a recent thing, still raw.

Your fingers go to your cuticles. They find the thumbnail and pick, a small old reflex, and you feel him do it all through the years of a job. Your jaw is rough with two or three days of stubble. Your scalp is bare and cool. You are tall, very tall, and your back aches the way a back does at fifty-two after hours of standing. The floor is hard under his black shoes. In the ache is something else: he used to smoke on the loading dock of his first office, and he quit. Your tongue still remembers the taste. He quit drinking too, one winter, without announcing it. There is a little money put away, enough for a bad year but not a good one. He counts it often.

The phone clicks. The voice says your name, and it is Howard.

You take the receiver from your shoulder and look at your hand. You turn it over. It is wide, creased, and entirely a stranger's, and it is yours until you spin again. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, "hello, Howard."

You don't know whether this lasts until tonight or until you next feel the wanting. Your thumb is already at the cuticle.