Jonas Brandt Wieczorek

Odell's knees ache. They have been aching for one minute, which is how long I have had them, and already I know the ache is old and has nothing to do with me. The cab of the truck smells of coffee gone cold and the vinyl is hot against his back. It is the middle of a Saturday and there are forty-one parcels behind the seat. He is sixty-three and settled. I would be asleep inside him in a week.

That is not why I go back. I go back because I reached for the radio and his thumb found the dial without me, and I felt how little of this was mine. I would not say that to anyone. I spin.

Then I am standing. The air is cool and green, the evening light is low and flat, and a hedge is breathing out the smell of wet leaves. My weight sits forward on the balls of two feet. A plastic grip is in my right hand, and its thin black line runs down to a dog that has its nose in the hedge. My right leg is bouncing, and I did not tell it to.

The jacket comes first. Cotton, worn soft, a zip that sticks at the collar. The cloth on my shoulders gives me a morning: a cold bedroom, a woman's back turned to him under a duvet, and him standing in socks pulling this jacket off a chair. He feels guilty that he is not sorry to be out of the room. He zips it to the chin and the zip catches, and he swears quietly so she will not wake.

The leash grip is warm plastic. My thumb finds the brake button without being asked. Through it comes a bathroom, a stranger's, the smell of old pipe and lemon cleaner, and him kneeling under a sink with the wrench handle against his collarbone. His shoulders ache and he loves the quiet of it. A tap drips, and when it stops he feels like a man who has fixed something. He is proud of it, and that is a bigger feeling than I expected.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. In them there is a courtyard of graffitied concrete and a woman in a green coat walking away from him through flat winter light. He does not call after her. He still knows exactly how far she got before the gate closed. It is a slow, particular ache and it is not mine. His girlfriend is the sleeping back. Even so, this other woman is still in the room of him.

My chin feels strange, a deep cleft that my tongue wants to find. My jaw is smooth and cold from a razor. The fringe sits heavy on my brows and I blow it off my eyes. I am tall. The world is further down than I am used to, and my legs are long and loose and young. Nothing hurts. The body is unspent, and I could weep at it.

The dog lifts its head out of the hedge and looks at me, ears flat. It knows. I wind the leash twice around my hand, and the dog will have to learn this stride.

I turn the hand over. The palm is callused along the base of the fingers, and the skin is dry from water and work. A stranger's hand, and it closes when I tell it to.

"Hallo," I say, and the voice is lower than I expected. "Na, komm."

I do not know how long he will last. It could be years. It could be before the dog finishes the hedge.