Imran Chowdhury

You are standing in Colt Hargrove's kitchen with the light off, and the freezer door open for the cold. Six feet of him, and the soft belly he never hid. Your thumb is still raw from the stripped bolt on the Ford in the barn, the one he swore at for three hours and you swore at for a minute. Somewhere in the house a clock ticks. Nobody is awake in the whole county.

You have no complaint about him. That is the trouble. His knees work, his truck starts, his mother calls on Sundays and you let it ring. You have been him for less than a minute of your own counting, and already you know the shape of the whole thing: the shop, the beer he does not turn down, the road to town, the same sky. You have stood at the sink with your hands under the tap and felt nothing arrive. The wheel is open on the phone in his back pocket. You wanted to be wanted by something, and nothing in him asks.

You press the button before the thought finishes.

Cold, then none. Then a bed, a heavy dark, and your face pushed into a pillow that smells of someone else's sleep. Your breath is ragged and you make it even. One arm hangs off the mattress, the knuckles almost on the floorboards, and you draw it up, roll onto your back, fold both hands on your chest. It is not how he sleeps. You can feel that the body does not know the position. Streetlight lies in a thin stripe through the gap in the curtains. A radiator ticks. Rain, somewhere below, on a stoop.

Eyes open. The ceiling is low and yellow with the lamp outside.

The shirt comes first. Cotton, black, washed soft, tight across the shoulders, and under your fingers it gives you a morning: him pulling it from a pile on a chair, sniffing the collar, deciding it would do for a lecture hall where no one looks at him. Sleeves tugged down over his forearms. His own habit, to cover them. You see the mirror in the hallway and not the face in it, only the feeling, a flat tiredness, a man doing sums.

The sheet under your palm is cool and twisted. A different night comes: this bed, a laptop glowing on his knees, a number on a loan screen with too many zeros, and the long steady panic that does not shout. Underwater, he thinks, in his own language and then in English. He closes the lid. He lies face-down because lying face-up means looking at it.

Your hand drifts to your jaw without being told. It is the trimmed beard, coarse and neat, and as your fingers rest there you learn it is what they do when he is thinking: face, chin, cheek, a small private comfort. A barber's chair arrives, a man with clippers saying hold still, the hard line at the back of the head. Pride in that line. He keeps it sharp every two weeks.

At your collar the skin is warm over the old ink. Your thumb finds it, a unit insignia, raised a little. And with it a heat, a flat brown desert and a boot-camp dawn, a friend's voice counting off, the only years in which he never doubted what he was for. He does not talk about it in the classroom. He talks to nobody about the quiet since.

You are heavy and he is used to it. The mattress holds your weight; your lungs sit low under it. Your back aches where the springs found it. Your calves are strong from stairs, and the stoop, and the wet walk home. Your stomach is full of nothing, a hunger he has long since stopped hearing. He has stopped drinking. You can taste the absence, a bright steady dullness, and the pride beneath it that no one saw.

Your hands lie on your chest, and you lift them into the stripe of light.

They are broad, brown, blunt at the fingertips, a small callus where a pen goes. You turn them over. Palm, back, palm. They are warm and they are yours, and a stranger's.

You look up at the dark ceiling and say, quietly, "All right. Hello, then."

And somewhere under the rain, under the breath you have made even, the wanting is only asleep. You lie still and wonder how long before it wakes, and whether this body will still be yours when it does.