Jonathan Landry

I am leaving Russell Dean Kluge, who has been mine for three minutes, and the reason is a small one. The house in Phoenix is dark, and everyone in it is asleep. His wife's breathing comes through the wall, and his stubble is rough under my palm. I stood at the kitchen counter with a glass of water and tried to want it. His belly sat soft against the counter edge, his feet ached the way a forklift man's feet do, and the whole house was warm and settled and wanted nothing from me. That was the trouble. Before him I was the mail carrier in New Orleans, Isaiah, twenty-one, with freckles and a beard I never stopped touching. I carried that man's last name up porch steps for exactly three minutes and I liked it. I was there when he looked at a brother's name on his phone and did not call. I can't leave that alone. I put the glass down and open the page with the wheel.

I pay and spin.

Blue light is on my cheek. The phone is six inches from my face and my thumb is stopped mid-scroll. I lie on my side in the dark, and the mattress is a little too soft under my hip. The thumb starts again on its own, faster and steadier than it was, and I let it. The screen slides past everything he stopped on. I do not blink when he would.

Then the sleeve against my wrist gives me something. It is gray cotton gone soft and thin, and a speck of white dust is dried into the cuff. It is the morning on a steep driveway, and I am in his hands pulling this shirt over my head because the other one smelled of joint compound. I remember the cold white light under the bay window and the garage door grumbling up. I remember my brother's name on a text I answered with only a thumbs-up. It is Isaiah, the one I was two spins ago. My own mouth, his mouth, nearly says it.

The sheet under my palm gives me the Sunday nights. I lie here dreading the six a.m. alarm and the sheets of rock stacked against bare studs. His knees ache in a clean, honest way. His shoulders are strong from lifting board, and his body is average and sturdy. His right thumbnail finds the skin at the edge of the left, and he picks at it. He has done it all his life, and now I do it, and a small sting blooms.

Under my tongue a nicotine pouch has gone cold. The taste reminds me of a roof in July and a night he got drunk with the crew and cried in a truck about nothing he could name. Nobody knows that about him. The tattoo on my forearm is fine lines and triangles, and when my eyes touch it I feel him sitting in a chair, nervous, choosing it, and not telling anyone why. The silver hoop in my ear is cool when the pillow presses it.

I stop scrolling. I hold up my hand in the blue light and turn it over. The cuticles are ragged, the palm is dry and chalky, and there is a callus at the base of each finger. It is a hand that knows how to hold a knife and a trowel without being asked.

I look up and say it quietly, into the dark and the lens of it: "Hey, little brother. I'm sorry."

Nobody answers. I don't know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether I am still him when the light turns.