Jacob Tillman Reese

You are standing in a kitchen in Miami, in the last orange of the day, and Patrick Lowell Dunn's knees are telling you what a day on rebar is. One minute old, this body. Already it has a sunburn on the back of the neck and a hum in the forearms, and a refrigerator full of someone else's food. You open it and nothing in it is a want. You drink water over the sink and watch a lizard hold still on the screen door, and the thing that sent you back is simple: he cannot be tired in a way that touches you. You wanted to be a man whose job was a voice in someone's ear. You wanted to be small and indoors. The wheel is a tab on a phone in a hand that smells of cement. You press the thumb down.

Light, and glass. You are standing, and the floor under your shoes is a plastic mat, slightly give. Your fingers are on a keyboard, mid-word. A voice in your ear is saying a policy number, patient, a little cross. The window is full of white afternoon and one saguaro with its arms up. You have typed a digit wrong. You feel the wrongness in the fingers before you see it: the error is his, the correcting is yours, slow, and then ten more times, each one checked, as if the keys might bite.

The hoodie comes first. Its cuffs are cotton gone soft, and as you press the wrist against the desk edge it hands you a morning: a dark room, a prayer rug rolled back into its corner, the cold of the floor through socks, then this hoodie pulled from a chair because the call center's air conditioning is set for meat. Left sleeve first. The zipper catches on the same tooth it always catches on. He does not think about it. The ring on the left hand clicks against the desk, and the click opens a whole year: a woman's voice saying his name wrong on purpose, a hospital corridor with a vending machine humming, the ring turning and turning on his finger for months afterward because he had lost weight, then, absurdly, gaining it back. Grief arrives as a weight low in the stomach, a soft heavy belly that is also just dinner and no one to cook for.

The lanyard swings. The badge is a photograph of him looking surprised. The toothpick is in the corner of your mouth, and you did not put it there. Your jaw knows it. Wood, mint, a little splinter, the only thing in this whole day that is only his. Under the shirt, the back piece pulls when you reach: script across the shoulder blades, a name and a date, the skin tight and tender at the edges, and the memory it gives is a chair, a buzzing needle, and him not flinching because flinching felt like disrespect. Your feet ache evenly. The standing desk was his idea. His back, the other one, the inked one, thanks him for it.

The caller says sir, are you still there.

You take your hands off the keys and hold them up in the window light. The ring. The pale band under it. A hand that has never lifted anything heavier than a headset. You turn it over, palm up, and the palm is soft and yours.

You look up, past the screen, at nothing, at the saguaro, and say quietly, "Still here." The toothpick moves. You do not know how long you get to be a man who is grieved this exact much, or when the wanting will come back like a phone buzzing in a pocket, or whether tomorrow this ring will still be on your hand.