Jesse Halvorsen

Tobias Larkin's beard is patchy, and I have been scratching at it for an hour. A logger's body is a good one. The shoulders carry weight, the knees complain on stairs, and the chainsaw hum stays in the palms until bedtime. But this afternoon the foreman handed me the saw and the hands knew exactly what to do, and I stood there thinking: they are so good at this that I am not needed. Even the sawdust smelled like a place I had been before I got there. So I sit in his truck at the end of the shift, the sky going orange over the hills, and I open the page. The wheel is already turning before I have decided anything.

Then the room goes dark and warm, and I am sunk into a couch.

Leather, cool through a gray sweater. A television throws light that moves across my face. The remote is loose in my right hand, and my left leg is bouncing, bouncing, a rhythm I did not choose and cannot stop. A bright frame floods the screen, and I sit up straight and set the remote on the couch arm. The leather creaks like something old being woken.

The sweater is first. Wool, the sleeve cuff gone soft at the wrist, and my thumb finds a loose thread. Suddenly it is morning, his morning, a different day: a woman's voice in a doorway saying *keep it, it looks better on you than me*. She is gone now. The ache lands in my chest like a swallowed stone, and it is not mine, and it is enormous.

The couch under my bare feet. Cold leather, cracked like a dry riverbed. He bought it secondhand for sixty dollars from a man in the Sunset who would not haggle. He carried one end down a steep driveway into the garage apartment under a bay window, and his back remembers it, a low hot line along the spine.

My tongue finds the pouch of dip packed against my lower lip, and the taste is mint and tar. Memory: a flight line at dusk, the cargo plane's belly open like a mouth, his ear protectors around his neck, the yellow reflective belt cinched at his waist. He had shouted over the engines to a friend, *I never drank, not once, you know that, I just need something in my mouth.* He was twenty-two. The jet-fuel smell still sits in the fibers of his hair.

My nose: I touch the bridge and feel the bend. A flash of a locker-room floor, a bright crack, laughter, someone holding a towel to his face. He was nineteen and not angry about it.

The leg bounces. The hands know what to do with the bounce.

Under all of it, the body is honest. Twenty-six, lean and strong, a tightness in the calves from standing on concrete all day, the shoulders tired in a way that is clean. There is not much money in the account, and his stomach knows it, the habit of counting before spending. He is lonely in a way he does not say. He half-believes something is out there, the way you half-believe in a tide.

None of this is mine. It passes through like weather.

On the screen, a joke lands. His mouth had been ready for it, the muscle lifting, and I do not laugh. I let it pass.

I raise my hands into the television light and turn them over. They are lighter than Tobias's, without sawdust in the creases, and there is a small callus at the base of each finger from rope or wrench.

"All right," I say, to the room, to the glow. "You're new."

The leg keeps bouncing. I wonder how long before I want to leave him, and whether tomorrow I will still be here.