Idris Malick

You are sixty-five in the mirror this morning, or you would be, if you still kept mirrors on your schedule. Alton Deveraux's knees crack when you get up from the recliner, and that sound is the whole reason you're here again — that, and the freckled hand on the armrest that isn't shaking today but was yesterday, and will be again tomorrow, some tremor the body came pre-loaded with that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with sitting still in him for eleven hours deciding. You made him instant coffee twice and didn't drink either cup. You have been him for less than a minute of actual clock time, spread out over a whole restless morning, because the wanting came back before the settling ever did. Alton's apartment smells like somebody else's cigarettes from the floor below and a lifetime of somebody else's cooking, and none of it is yours, and none of it interests you enough to stay. You go to the laptop already open on his kitchen table — his, not yours, though it is yours now the way everything is — and the wheel is still on the screen from last night. You didn't even close the tab. That tells you something about who you are, if you cared to look. You don't. You pay. You spin.

The wooden spoon is already turning in your hand — no, against your hand, because for one full second there are two directions at once, his stir and your arrival colliding in the same wrist, and then his gives way and yours takes over and the circle goes the other way without your ever choosing it. You are standing at a stove that is not the stove you left. Steam off a pan of chicken and peppers, garlic gone a little too far, and your body — his body, tall in a way Alton's never was, twenty-four in every joint — makes a small adjustment you didn't tell it to make, tips salt into the pan on reflex, and you don't taste it, you never taste it, this isn't your kitchen and it isn't your hunger. Morning light is coming low and gold down the block outside a window you haven't looked through yet. Your free hand, without asking you, opens the cabinet above the counter and takes down a second plate and sets it next to the first.

That's when it starts coming in — not from deciding, from touching. The spoon handle is worn smooth in one spot from a grip that isn't yours yet and immediately is: a hundred dinners cooked one-handed while scrolling a phone propped against the toaster. The green sleeve against your forearm remembers itself onto you — Thursday, an early class that let out at ten, the walk back down streets where the marble steps are worn into soft white dips by a hundred years of other people's shoes, his own stoop with its particular hollow shaped by his own feet more than anyone's, because he's lived there since he was small and it is the one place in the city that fits him exactly. The shirt was pulled on in a bedroom with the shade half down, over a T-shirt already worn, sleeve by sleeve, not thinking about it, the way you dress when your hands already know the answer and don't consult you.

Under the clothes: shoulders built by rowing crew two years running before his knee started complaining about it, a body that still wants that motion sometimes and doesn't get it, a mild persistent tightness low in the back from a laptop bag worn wrong for four years of campus lawns. A pack of cigarettes rides in the hoodie pocket he isn't wearing right now, but the want for one arrives anyway, dry and specific, at the back of the throat, timed to nothing, just Thursday. He doesn't drink — never has, never will, the given of him as fixed as his mole, that dark mark high on the cheek he catches sometimes in reflections and forgets is there the rest of the time. Prayer comes back through the soles of his feet on the kitchen tile, a habit of orienting the body a certain way even when he isn't performing it, an old compass needle that still twitches.

And the second plate — that's the one that costs something. You feel it arrive through his hand before you understand it: her plate. Two months gone and he still sets two down some nights before he catches himself, before the catching itself becomes its own small ritual of missing her, a woman whose name comes with a specific laugh attached and no bitterness left in it, just the shape of an absence he's gotten almost used to setting a place for. Tonight — no, this morning, his morning, the two of you out of sync by hours neither of you asked for — he isn't stopping himself. He's letting the second plate sit there a while before he puts it back. That's new. You didn't do that. He was already doing that, before you got here, and you only walked into the middle of it.

You look down. The hand on the spoon is younger than any hand you've worn in months — no scars, no marks, skin that hasn't had time yet to be told what it's for. You turn it over slowly, palm up, like checking whether it followed you through.

You say, out loud, to the empty kitchen and the smell of garlic gone too far, "Okay. Let's see what you've got."