Isaiah Colburn

You are in the kitchen of a man named Martin Aldous, and the kettle has not yet clicked off. The house is dark and the window over the sink shows only you: heavy shoulders, stubble, a mouth that has been tired for forty-four years. Less than a minute ago you were not him. You have just spent the whole of that minute learning that he cannot sit still. His knee goes. His thumb rubs the pad of his first finger, over and over, as if the world were a circuit he could trace and fix. You asked it to stop and it did not.

That is not the reason. The reason is the fridge, which has a child's drawing on it, and a name in a child's hand, and you do not know whose child, and the not-knowing has begun to feel like standing in somebody's church. You want a body that carries nothing you have to be careful with. You open the page. The wheel turns, and you let it.

Wet air. You are mid-step, and the kerb is not where your foot expected it, so you pitch off it and your palm slaps the cold roof of a parked car. Rain beads under your fingers. The street swings, then settles. The scuff in your left foot, that dragging every third step, stops. You did not decide it. The leg simply remembers how to land.

The alcohol is a warm tide behind your eyes. Your tongue tastes sweet and burnt. Your legs are long and light, nineteen years old, and under the drink they are strong.

The jacket hangs open, its cloth stiff and damp at the cuffs. You close your fingers on the lapel, and he comes up through it: a closet in a room with two beds, the other bed empty. The jacket is the one thing he bought for himself. He stood in the mirror and pushed the collar up and thought, *I look like somebody who is going somewhere.* Then he took it off and put it on again, because he'd liked the thought and wanted to have it twice.

The T-shirt clings to your ribs. At the left breast the metal bar of the piercing shifts against the cotton, cold, a small private weight. A flash comes with it: a back room, laughing, a friend saying *don't you dare*, the pinch and then the pride, which he told nobody on base. Below that comes the boot-camp morning, and the fatigues, and the sergeant's voice. He learned to fold himself small in a uniform, and the piercing is the part of him the uniform never touched.

You push your hand through your hair. It is dyed hard black and parted exactly in the middle, falling either side of your forehead, too even, and the memory arrives with the feel of it: the bathroom, the bottle, a mirror, the care. He wanted to look finished. He wanted to look like a person you couldn't guess about.

Your thumb finds your chin, the deep cleft, the smooth skin of the shave he gave himself before going out. He did it slowly and carefully, because his grandmother used to hold his face by that chin and say it was where God had put his thumb. Church. Folding chairs, a hot hall, a hymn he can still sing from the bottom up, and the woman's hand under his jaw.

His pockets give you a few crumpled bills, a key, a phone gone dark. The money is thin. You feel the arithmetic of it, the month's end, what he sends and what he keeps. There was a night he did not tell his mother he'd spent most of it on a round of drinks for men who were not his friends. You feel the shame, and under the shame the thirst for being liked.

At the corner, the other way is home. You turn left.

You lift your hand into the streetlight and look at it. The knuckles are broad, the nails bitten, the palm still beaded with rain from the roof of the car. You turn it over. It does not feel borrowed. That is what unsettles you, how quickly it fits.

You look up, at nothing, at the lit wet road, and you say it aloud, in a voice lower than any you have had in a while: "Well, hello, Isaiah."

The street gives nothing back. Somewhere a sprinkler ticks. You flex the fingers and wonder how long the wanting will stay quiet this time, whether at sunrise you will still be standing in him, or whether the wheel is already turning somewhere behind your ribs.