Imran Qureshi

You are standing in Leonard Fontaine's kitchen in Miami, and the light has not come up yet. His knees hurt. They have hurt since you got here, a dull wet ache on the stairs, and you have been him for less than a minute. You are holding his coffee in his big, slow hand and you realize you do not want his coffee. His wife's slippers are by the door. The refrigerator hums. It is a good, quiet, finished life, and you cannot make it feel like yours. It is a coat that fits and carries no weather. So you go back to the page with the wheel on it, and your thumb is already moving.

Two spins ago you were Russell Tuttle, who hated a man in Maine without ever having met him, and you wore that hatred around for a minute like a borrowed watch. It ticked. You did not put it down. Now it is your reason, and you will not say so.

The wheel stops.

The oak is suddenly in front of you, enormous, with rope going up into it. Your weight is on your heels and your fingers are mid-knot. Cold comes in through the nose. Salt and wet leaves. Your hands are already doing the next thing, and they do it wrong. A half-second stumble. You stop, undo it, and tie it again slowly, and it is correct.

Then you check it. You check the next ten the same way, each one, pulling, seating, testing, on knots these hands have tied since before you arrived.

The jacket is stiff canvas against your shoulders, and the sleeve cuff is cold at the wrist. Through the cuff comes a morning: a dark kitchen, a kettle, his arm going into this sleeve while he stood barefoot and did not turn on the light, because turning it on would have shown him the second mug still in the rack. Her mug. He left it there. You feel how he left it there on purpose, a small stupid stubbornness, and how it was a kind of loyalty.

The harness bites at the thighs. Rope sits coiled on his shoulder, and when your palm closes on it the memory is whole: a branch letting go above a driveway, a stranger's car, his own voice saying *clear* before the sound came. Nobody was hurt. He sat in his truck afterward for twenty minutes with a hand over his mouth. That is why he checks everything. You didn't know that until now.

Your jaw is rough with stubble. Under the helmet your scalp is hot, and when you touch the scar through the eyebrow, with a knuckle, nothing comes, only the plain fact of it. Behind it, from the pocket against your ribs, comes a flat metal weight. A vape, warm from his body, and the wanting in his throat for it is old and polite. Below that is another wanting, last night's, a bottle by the sink and the ugly gratitude of the first swallow. His head is tight with it now, and his mouth is dry. You can taste it, and you can tell he was ashamed.

The house stands behind you, silver shingles, traps stacked in the dooryard. It is all he has, under five thousand dollars of everything, and you can feel that he has made peace with that, mostly, the way you make peace with a tooth.

You lift your hands and turn them over in front of the oak. The knuckles are scabbed. The calluses are thick as coins across the palms. They are younger than anything you've worn in a long time, quick, and they keep wanting to work.

You look up and say, to nobody, "All right. Let's see what you were afraid of."

The wheel is still turning somewhere under your tongue. You do not know whether you will be him by noon, or by the time the sun clears the spruce, or for another minute at all.