Jonah Park

You are standing at a line cook's sink in the dark, and you are leaving him because of the ladle.

It is the third one tonight, the same hand you have worn for under a minute. Raúl Whitcomb's knuckles ache in the gray silver wash of the stove light. His forearms are scarred with small burns, and the stubble itches. You asked the wheel for a man who could do things. This one can do exactly one thing, and he does it fast and well, and you were bored the instant you knew it. Nobody else is awake in this town. A bad knee, a pot of stock gone cold, the whole house breathing. You dry his hands on his apron, take out the phone, and pay.

The wheel turns. You stop being a cook.

You are on your side, and the phone is six inches from your face. Blue light lies on one cheek. Your thumb has stopped mid-scroll and it starts again on its own, faster and steadier than it was, and the screen blurs past everything he had paused on. Your eyes have forgotten to blink. You blink. The mattress is thin under your hip and the springs are loud. There is a dry taste in your mouth, sleep and no drink at all, a mouth that has never known a beer.

Then the things start to talk to you.

The T-shirt against your ribs is soft from washing and thin at the collar. You are in it before you know it is a memory. Hands, his hands, pull it over his head in a bathroom with a flickering bulb, the day before yesterday, and the feeling in it is tired and decent. He was proud of the white overalls drying on the hook. Your knuckles brush the sheet, and the sheet is a whole morning. A drop cloth snaps open, a room is emptied, and blue painter's tape goes along the trim in a line so straight it is nearly a prayer. He talked to no one all day. He liked that.

Your fingers are drumming on the edge of the phone. You didn't tell them to. A rhythm is in them, a small tapping like rain, something he did at the table in his mother's kitchen, and under it comes the smell of rice and a window with wheat stubble beyond it, cut short and gold. A thunderhead stacks black over the field. The light has gone yellow. He is nineteen and the thing that hurts is his nose, split by a door, a ball, a fist, you don't catch which, only the bright white crack and the nurse setting it with her thumbs. You touch the bridge of it now. It sits slightly crooked under your fingertip, and a small sorrow rises with it, not yours.

The pillow gives you something else. Candle smoke, a little salt in a dish, a card turned over by lamplight. He kept a quiet faith that nobody in the county knew about, and it felt like a hand on his back. The nightstand is crowded with pill bottles and receipts. Under all of it is the weight of money he owes, a number so large it sits on his chest even in sleep. He is underwater, and he never told anyone.

His body is twenty-two and it works. The legs are strong, the shoulders ache pleasantly from ladders, the jaw is smooth where he shaved it clean. The breath comes easy. Nothing in you hurts, which is the first luxury of him.

You lift the phone away and set it on the sheet, screen down, and the dark closes over the room. You hold up your hand. Turn it over. The calluses are in the right places. A fleck of white paint lies in the crease of one knuckle where he missed it.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, and kind. "Hello, Jonah."

Somewhere in the wanting, already, a small quiet question begins: how long.