Isaiah Fontenot

You leave Sean Mulhearn's body in the middle of the morning, with a truck idling at a curb in Philadelphia and a stack of boxes that have to be signed for. His knees ache on stairs, his freckled forearms are sunburned on one side only, and his mouth keeps asking for a cigarette. You came into him less than a minute ago. In that minute you found the one thing he can't do, and it was to stand still in his own life without wanting someone else's. That is not his fault. It is what you brought. So you open the page with the wheel on it, pay, and spin.

Then you are standing at a machine. The plastic is pouring out of the die in a clear, warm sheet, and your hands are on it, guiding it to the spool. A motion goes wrong. Your left hand comes in a half-beat late, and the sheet kinks. You do it again, slowly and correctly. Then ten more times, each one checked, on a job this body has done ten thousand times and has not needed to check in years.

The air smells of hot resin and cold concrete. Light comes grey through the open bay door, and past the rooflines there are mountains. It is early, and the day has barely started.

The shirt comes first. Navy cotton, soft at the cuffs, rolled twice. The sleeve rubs the inside of your elbow and you are standing in a dark kitchen with a woman's back to you at the stove. She is humming something from church, and you, he, button the shirt wrong by one and she fixes it without turning around. Warmth. Ease. Under it, a low hum of money owed that never quite shuts off.

The tattoo itches under the sleeve. You don't look at it. Something comes anyway: a needle, a name in script, a date, and a feeling that is pure steadiness.

Something is in your mouth. A toothpick, worn soft at one end. You chew it and the flavor of mint and wood brings the gym of a high school and a coach who said keep your mouth busy and your temper quiet. Under that, he has never had a drink and never wanted one. He watched a man he loved empty himself out that way, and the memory is a closed door he keeps his shoulder against.

The ring is cool and a little loose from the cold. Touching it with your thumb brings another woman, an earlier one, laughing in a car, and a goodbye on a curb that wasn't finished. He still carries her like a stone in a pocket, smooth from handling. It isn't a betrayal. It is only true.

Earplugs hang at your collar, yellow foam on a cord. You pinch one and you feel a pay stub, a number, and a bigger number behind it, the house and the loan, the water rising, and still he gets up in the dark and does it right.

Your body is twenty-five and strong. The shoulders are loose, the calves are tight from concrete, the lower back has begun, faintly, to talk. When you smile, his dimples cut in without your asking.

You lift your hands from the plastic and look at them. Brown, capable, a ring on the left. You turn them over. Then you look up and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello, Isaiah."

Somewhere in you the question is already there, small and patient: how long. An hour, a year. You can't know. The sheet keeps pouring.