Hugo Ellison Brandt

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Small-town Ohio with a glass of water you haven't drunk. The house is asleep. The refrigerator hums, and Curtis's wife (you think of her as his, because you have never touched her) is down the hall behind a door you have been careful not to open. You have been him for two minutes. His nose, broken once, whistles faintly on the left side. His belly presses the counter edge. Skinny-fat, a man who looks soft and is soft, and none of it is a complaint.

It isn't him. He works. Everything he has works. The trouble is that two minutes in, you opened a drawer and found a box of birthday cards he'd kept and could not read a single one, because the feeling that was supposed to come with them did not come. It was only paper. You stood there with the lid in your hand and understood that you are the sort of person who will always want to go through the next door. You will not say it aloud.

You put the glass down. The phone is already in your hand. The wheel turns, and the kitchen goes out like a pulled plug.

Then the dark is different. It is warmer, and thick with the smell of sleep. You are face-down in sheets, one arm hanging into cool air, a thread of streetlight across your eyelid. Your breathing is ragged, and you make it even. You roll onto your back. The arm comes up by itself and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out, which is wrong, you can tell, a posture he has never once slept in.

You lie still. Your bald scalp is damp against the pillow. The goatee itches. The mattress holds the long weight of a man six feet tall, soft through the middle, and there is a dull ache under the left shoulder blade from the way he was lying.

The ring is the first thing you touch. Your right thumb finds it on the left hand, a plain band worn smooth, and it turns once. A church basement, folding chairs, coffee in styrofoam. A woman in a green dress laughing at him because he had put the ring on the wrong finger, and his whole chest going loose with luck. Then it's gone and you are in the dark again with your heart going.

You push up on one elbow. The T-shirt is soft from a thousand washes, and the cotton drags at your ribs. Pulling it straight, you get a morning in his hands: a Sunday, the youngest on his shoulders, a small heel drumming his collarbone. He is late, and he is happy to be late. The pajama pants have a drawstring he knots twice from habit, and your fingers find the double knot before you think of it. Under that comes a different year. A lawyer's office, an ex-wife, a signature, the pen heavy and his throat tight and no one watching. He never told the current one how long he sat in the car afterward. It is his, and now it is in you like swallowed ice.

Your feet find the carpet. It is dense and cool, and the sole of the left foot remembers a toy stepped on in the dark, and a whispered curse that was not quite a curse because three small people were asleep. He prays in this room. You feel it in your knees, the pull to kneel at the bed's edge, the words unfinished and ordinary. Thank you for the work. Keep them. Forgive the second drink.

On the nightstand there is a can, a few swallows warm in the bottom, and you don't touch it. His mouth wants it anyway, a small tired wanting that is not yours and sits in you like a coat.

You swing your legs over and sit with your forearms on your knees. Your back says forty-nine. Your thighs are strong from stairs, and your hands are thick, square, and capable of a firm handshake that has closed deals across glass tables.

You lift them into the streetlight and turn them over. The ring catches. You flex the fingers, and they obey a man you have never met.

You look up and say, quietly, in a Spanish that arrives with the mouth, "Bueno. Otra vez."

Somewhere below the words is the question that is always there. How long. A year, a night, four minutes. The wanting will come back, and you do not know when.