Isaiah Merriweather

You are Kyle Brennan for less than a minute, and already it is wrong. The shoulders are too wide for the way you want to stand. The truck keys on the counter belong to a man who is sure of himself, and the morning sun through the kitchen window is warm on a forearm that has nothing left to ask of you. He works. He lifts. He has a name people say twice in a row, cheerfully. You have nothing against him, and that is the trouble. You wanted something and it was not this, and you cannot say what it was, so you open the page with the wheel on it and let your thumb decide.

The wheel turns. Kyle Brennan is a coat you leave on a chair.

Now the belt is running. A carton of eggs is under your right hand and the scanner is in your left, and you have already done something wrong with both. The red light slides across the barcode and misses. You do it again, slowly, on purpose, and it beeps. The sound goes through you like a held note. Someone's cart is in front of you. A woman in a white shirt is waiting, and you do not know what she wants, so you do the next item carefully, and the next, ten of them, each one checked, each one a small proof that you are here and the hands obey.

The vest comes first. Its nylon is stiff at the pocket seams, and where you touch it the cloth gives back a morning: a closet door that sticks, a dryer's warm gray t-shirt pulled over his head, the lanyard looped over the afro and his fingers fixing the card so the photo faces out. He was thinking of her, the recent one, the way she used to flick the card straight. He did not text her. He put the vest on and zipped nothing. Under the shirt, between the shoulder blades, the weight of the crest is just skin to you, but he feels it as pride. A team his father loved, ink he paid for in installments, and it itches when he sweats.

The scanner's grip is worn smooth, and it gives you a whole month of Tuesdays, the fluorescent hum, the manager saying "good pace" without looking up. Your thumb finds the lip of the nail on your first finger and the teeth want it. He bites them down to nothing when he is nervous, and you feel the old ragged edge and the taste of it. The jeans hold yesterday's rain at the hem. His feet ache in the black shoes, the arches flattening toward the end of a shift, and the floor tile gives back the cold. Behind the register a pocket holds a folded church bulletin, and when your fingers close on it you get a Sunday: a hundred voices, his own cracking on the high part of the hymn, and him believing it all the way down. Rent is due. The account holds a little under what he needs, and he counts it every night like a rosary.

The woman clears her throat. The beard is rough under your knuckle where you scratch it. Your pulse is fast, and his body is hungry, a little, for lunch he has not had.

You lift the scanner and look at the hand that holds it, the nails bitten ragged. You turn it over. The palm is warm and creased, and it is yours now.

You look up at her and say, "Sorry about the wait. Paper or plastic?" Your voice is lower than you expect, and it carries.

How long, you wonder. The belt keeps moving.