Jason Mikami

You have been Curtis Landgraf for a day and two hours, and the first thing you have learned about him is that his knees are bad. Six-four is a long way to fall every time you get out of a car. The seat of his Camry has a dent in it shaped like him, and the dent does not fit you. Today a woman in the back asked him to stop, got out in front of a house with all the blinds drawn, and left the door open and the dome light on, and you sat there at the curb with the engine ticking and the flat Kansas evening going orange across the hood. Nothing happened. Nothing was going to. The body worked. It was the working you could not stand: the same road, the same grain elevator, the app chiming like a small bell. You thought: I have been tall now. You thought: there must be something that does not ache when it stands up. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and Curtis's thumb, which is the size of a bottle cap, hovers and presses.

The wind stops.

All of it, at once, as if a hand had closed on the field. You are standing on boards, and a screen door has just finished banging against your shoulder blade and is still trembling there. The air is thick and green and smells of cut soy and hot metal. Your jaw is working. There is a toothpick in your mouth, flat and wet at the end, and you have been chewing it down without being asked to.

Then the clothes begin. The T-shirt, olive, washed thin, is cool against your ribs, and it hands you a morning: a closet with no door, the shirt pulled off a hanger-less pile, his arms going up through it, left sleeve first, because the right shoulder catches. He pulled the collar flat with two fingers, as he does every day, and felt fine about it. A cheap watch is strapped to the wrist. Fastening it, he checked it against the microwave, always, four minutes fast on purpose, so he would never be late to the register.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. They give you the lane: the belt rolling, a woman's cans of beans, the scanner's red line crossing the barcode again and again until the beep lives in his teeth. Eight hours of it. He is good at it. He says "Have a good one" and means it about half the time and is not ashamed of the half. You feel his feet hurting from concrete and the dull pride of a drawer that comes out even.

The boots are heavy and cracked at the toe. Through the soles come the porch boards, and through them a father's voice, nailing the rail, saying, hold it level, Jay, and the boy holding it, squinting, the little pale scar in his eyebrow new then, a skinned jump off a hay wagon, itching. He feels the nose ring too, a thin cold hoop, and with it a stubborn little rebellion that nobody in town ever mentioned. Church on Sundays, the folding chairs, the potluck ham. A closed diner on Main where he washed dishes at sixteen, the one stoplight blinking over it. Money is a number he checks and does not like, and he has never had a drink and has never wanted one, because he watched what it did and decided.

His body is strong in the plain way: thighs, forearms, a back that can lift a flat of water without thinking. Twenty-two years old, and nothing hurts. Your lungs open all the way. You could weep at how little weight there is.

Ahead, the cloud walks across the field, black-green, and the porch light behind you hums. He would have gone inside. You step down off the boards toward the weather, chin up, hands loose.

You lift your hands. They are lean, brown-knuckled, a callus at the side of one finger from a scanner's trigger. You turn them over. Then you look up at the green sky and say, quietly, "Okay. You'll do." Somewhere under the thunder, the question is already there, small as a coin: how long. Tomorrow, or the next time the wanting comes back, which could be any minute now.