Julian Mercado

You are standing at the kitchen counter in Nathan Ferrell's apartment, and the glass eye is dry. It always dries around now. You press the lid with a knuckle and it settles, and the stubble on his jaw rasps under your thumb. Fourteen hours and four minutes. He was a good body. He got up when you told him to. He ran the Friday meeting without a stumble. He could not, it turns out, hold the thing you wanted: a depth in the left side of the room, a way of reaching for a glass without misjudging it by an inch. Three times tonight you have knocked the water over. The inch is not his fault. It is just the inch, and tonight it is all you can think about. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and it is nearly midnight, and you pay.

The wheel turns and clicks, and the white takes you.

The couch takes your weight before you have decided to sit. The room is dark. The television throws its light across your face in cold sheets, and the remote is loose in your right hand. Then the show cuts to a bright frame and your spine straightens on its own. You set the remote on the couch arm. The laugh that was in this chest a second ago is simply gone, and you watch the rest in silence.

The shirt comes first. It is soft and thin at the collar, a gray-black cotton washed a hundred times, and it lies against your back like a hand. In his feeling, not yours: this morning, Friday, the shirt was the last thing he reached for at the bottom of the drawer, after the navy quarter-zip stayed on its hanger. Work was done, and the badge was already in the tray by the door. He pulled the shirt over his head slowly, one arm and then the other, tired in a way that had nothing to do with his body. A mezzanine walkway, a floor of forklifts below him, a clipboard under his arm, and a number in his head that never moved. The debt. Over a hundred thousand, underwater, and he thought of it daily, like a stone in a shoe.

The cushion under your thighs gives, and your fingers close on the couch arm. A smell comes up from the fabric, old coffee and dust, and with it a girl's laugh in a different apartment. An old girlfriend, her feet in his lap on this same couch, years ago. It aches, a thin warm ache with no name attached to it. You do not know her. He does, and he misses her anyway.

The body is five-seven, soft in the middle, and the knees complain when you shift. You are not heavy so much as unfinished. Your right hand drifts up and touches your face, the cheek and then the moustache, and you did not tell it to. Under the thumb the fringe lies blunt and straight across the forehead, cut by his own scissors in a bathroom mirror, and you feel him being proud of that.

The ink on the forearm itches. A man in a shop drew those lines for two hours, and he sat still and thought about church the next morning, about whether his mother would see it. The pew, the hymn, the hands raised. He still prays, badly, in the dark, before sleep. The prayer comes up in you like a sip of water.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Fine lines run up the wrist, and the palm is warm and strange.

You look up, into the dark where the screen is, and you say, "Hello, Julian."

You wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back.