Joel Brannigan

The Leon body is tired in the particular way of a man who has driven since dawn. His knees are sixty-five years old and they announce the truck step every time. I am parked outside a feed store, a paper sack of someone's tacos going cold on the passenger seat, and the phone is already open to the wheel.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what I can't say aloud, even alone. He has a lean back, a decent heart, a route he knows, and a patience that people mistake for peace. Four hours ago a woman on a porch took her bag from him, said "God bless," and shut the door. The silver stubble on his jaw itched all the way down the gravel road. I had been him for under a minute when I knew I did not want to be blessed. I wanted to be carried by something young. I press the screen.

Cold concrete under boots. Cardboard against my palm, the rough crinkle of shrink wrap at my knuckles. A forklift beeps somewhere beyond the racking, and my hand is already moving: scan, read, lift. Then it goes wrong for half a second. The hand reaches for the wrong box. I catch it and do it again slowly, correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, which on this job has not needed checking in years.

The polo clings damp between my shoulder blades, and the vest weighs on my collarbones. The scanner on the wrist is a hard little brick, and when I brush it, a flash comes up that is his and not mine: a kitchen at five in the morning, a girl's sweatshirt over a chair, his own hand reaching for it and then leaving it where it was so she would find it there. The warmth of that comes up in my chest like a swallowed mouthful of coffee.

My jaw is working. There is gum in my mouth, soft and sweet, and the chewing is automatic, a rhythm older than any thought. I touch the vest's reflective strip and get another flash: the morning, the dresser, the polo pulled over his head still smelling of dryer sheets, one arm and then the other, the vest taken off its hook by the door because it was always on that hook. His boots, laced in the dark on a bungalow porch, mountains pale behind the rooflines, a cigarette he lit and let burn down to the filter because he was listening to a bird. He is twenty. He thinks nothing can hurt him because nothing yet has.

His body is enormous in a way Leon's never was. The shoulders carry weight without asking. The thighs are warm and ready. His back aches, a small bright ache low down, the honest kind from lifting. Clean jaw, smooth under my thumb. Hair falling into his eyes, and I blow it aside.

I lift my hand and turn it over. Calluses along the base of the fingers, a smear of dust, freckles even on the knuckles. I look up, past the racking and the open dock door, to the pale mountains.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that is deeper than I expected. "Okay. You'll do."

The gum clicks in my cheek. I don't know how long this one lasts. Already, somewhere under the breastbone, something small and hungry is stirring.