Isaac Terrell Fontenot

You are standing in a kitchen in Philadelphia, in a mechanic's body, in the gray before anyone is up, and you have been Patrick Dolan Brennan for two minutes. Two minutes is long enough to find out. His knuckles are split. His shoulders carry the garage even on a Sunday. You reach for the coffee can and your hands already know the lid, and that is the trouble. It is too easy. A man who can do everything for you leaves you nothing to want, and the wanting has come back up your throat like a taste. The laptop is open on the table with the wheel on it, turning. You press.

The couch takes you before the floor goes. The room is dark and the television is bright, and a laugh track is dying in the middle of a joke you did not hear. The remote is loose in your right hand. Your breath is slow and sleepy, a man lowered halfway into night. You sit up straight. You set the remote on the couch arm, and the screen cuts to white.

The sweatshirt comes first, soft and washed thin, heavy across the shoulders. Wearing it gives you the morning. He pulled it off the chair, left arm first, because the tattoo itches when the cuff drags it, and his wife called from the bedroom, "Wear the gray one, it's cold," and he did not, and he smiled at the wall about it. The sweatpants hold the warmth of the cushion. The wedding band is a cool little ring of pressure on the hand resting on your thigh. When you turn it, you get her. Not a face yet, a voice, singing hymns off-key over dishes. Church on folding chairs. His mother's hand on the back of his neck, saying *you pray on it, baby*. The faith in him is not a belief but a floor, something he stands on without thinking.

The couch fabric is rough under your palm, and there is a hole in the arm where a thumb has picked at it for years. Behind it comes a different woman, the one who got away. The two of them sat on this very couch before he was married, and she said, "You'll never leave this city," and he did not argue. He still hasn't told anyone that he checks, sometimes, where she lives now. It sits in him like a swallowed stone, quiet and warm.

Your feet are in socks on a cool floor. Your back aches low, the ache of ten hours at a standing desk, and your stomach is soft and comfortable under the sweatshirt. You are not built for anything. You are built for sitting and for thinking. The beard is a pleasant wool on your jaw, and the little hoop in your ear catches the screen's light. His fingers know the remote and the trackpad and the shape of a keyboard. Somewhere in them is a cold coffee, and a bug he has been chasing all week. It is the middle of the night and the house is asleep. He stayed up because he couldn't stop thinking, and you can feel what it was. Somebody's life, something unfinished, a little money put away. He was saving for something, and you can almost feel what.

The screen goes on without you laughing.

You lift your hands into the light. Freckled forearms, a band of gold, ink under the cuff, faded and bold. You turn one over. The palm is warm and unfamiliar and entirely yours. Then you look up, past the screen, into the dark.

"Okay," you say softly. "Hello, Isaac."

The house stays quiet around you, and you wonder how long it will take before this body stops being enough, and whether it already has started.