Joel Anthony Brandvold

You are standing in a kitchen in Coastal Maine, in a body that is fifty-three and has a bad left knee, and the coffee in your hand has gone lukewarm. Walter Lyle Gagnon. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know the gap in his front teeth by the way your tongue keeps finding it. The window over the sink is black. His wife's boots are not by the door, because you have checked, and there is no wife, and nobody has told you why you looked.

An engineer's hands. They want to measure things. The mug is the wrong size for them, the table is a quarter-inch off level, and you can feel him noticing it. That is the trouble with him. He is competent and finished. Everything he touches is already understood, and there is nothing in him you can want. You stand there with a working body and feel the old hunger come up under it like water in a basement. Pay. Spin. Somebody else.

The wheel turns, and then there is cold.

Cold in the nose, cold in the teeth, a steady burn in the chest. Your right foot is landing as your left should, and the stride has to be rebuilt in the air. You stumble and it never lands, and you are running. Gravel crunches under you. The canal lies to your left, black and flat. Breath comes out in front of your face and you run through it. Something buzzes on your wrist and you do not look.

Then the memories start, and they come through what you touch.

The jacket first, the zip cold against your throat. A morning in this jacket: the closet door, the hanger bar, the left sleeve that always catches on the thumbhole. He put it on in the dark so as not to wake the building. He lives alone, and he is still courteous to the quiet. He zipped it to the chin and stood a moment in the hall. Under the courtesy lay the old habit of prayer before running, two sentences, never more. You feel it as ease, not as words.

The watch, a hard knock against the wrist bone. He bought it used, and he has not worn the old one since the engagement ended. The cheap band chafes. Mile four, it says. The woman who got away is in that watch somehow. She timed him once at a lake, laughing, shouting splits from the dock. He still gives himself her numbers. The ache that arrives is not yours and is not small.

The ring, in the right pocket of the pants, a thin band against your thigh. Your fingers go in without being asked and turn it over and over. His hands have always done this, in pulpits and in waiting rooms. It is hers, never returned. He is thirty-four and he carries it like a stone he cannot name. You hold it and your eyes sting, and none of that is yours.

The shoes, dress shoes in your memory, then the runners now. The pavement changes under them. A different year: a winter basement, a boy with a bloodied nose. Someone's fist, someone's door, a bad night at nineteen. The nose set crooked afterward, and he kept it, a small refusal to be fixed. You feel the bridge of it ache in the cold.

A last thing, in the ribs: a drawer holding a single cigar, not smoked, kept for the day a particular thing is forgiven. He has no money and never did. He has a sanctuary that empties on Sundays and a room of folding chairs. Quiet is his wealth.

The path bends. You slow, and then you stop. Your lungs heave, steady and strong.

You lift your hands. Fine lines run along the forearm in geometry you do not know the meaning of. Your fingers curl, then open, and the ring is in your palm. You turn it over once. You raise your eyes to the dark water and the bridge beyond it.

"All right," you say, in a voice that is not his and now is. "Let's see how long you last."