Keanu Tolliver

Andre Whitcomb's knees ache on the principal's carpet, and that is part of it, but only a small part. The office is full of Tuesday noon. A boy sits outside the door waiting to be told something. Andre has told so many boys so many things in this body, and every one of them sounded right in his mouth, in that low steady voice, and I felt nothing when it came out. The beard itches. The belly sits over the belt like a loaf. Forty minutes ago a woman cried at this desk and I watched her the way you watch rain on a window. I have been him less than a minute, in the sense that matters: he was always the last thing the wheel gave me, and the wanting has come back. My thumb is already on the trackpad. The page opens. The wheel is there, patient, and I pay.

It stops, and the principal is gone.

I am standing, and my arm is moving in a circle. A wooden spoon, a pan, something pale and crumbling in it, and the circle is stopping because I stopped it. I start it again the other way. The light is yellow and low, a round bulb overhead, and the window is the blue of before anything has started. Salt is in my fingers. I scatter it and do not taste. Heat on my forearm. Feet in soft slippers on cold tile.

The shirt comes first, soft and worn thin at the collar, against my back. Through it, his hands: pulling it from a drawer in the dark, because he is quiet in this apartment, because there is no one to wake. The pants, drawstring knotted twice. He tied that knot the night before. Then the spoon's handle, smooth where his thumb has worn it, and I know he learned this dish from a woman at church who wrote nothing down, and that the first time he made it alone it came out wrong and he ate all of it anyway. The counter edge presses my hip. Grease smell, coffee, a plant on the shelf he talks to. I think he does not drink anymore, and the memory of a bottle comes up from the cabinet under the sink like cold air. Smoking too: the ache in my fingers when they have nothing to hold is old, retired, still there.

The earring tugs when I turn my head. Under the shirt, across my shoulders, the ink pulls warm. It is a thing he chose at twenty-two, and nobody here has seen it in years. His hands know pipe: they know a wrench's weight, the quarter turn before it bites, the way water sounds when a fitting is wrong. Thirty-six years in this back, strong across the shoulders, a dull ache in both knees from kneeling under other people's sinks. He has money, more than the apartment says. He keeps it quietly and I do not know yet why. Tithing, I think, and a mother's roof he fixed from far away.

My hand reaches without me. A second plate comes down from the rack, and I set it beside the first. The ceramic clicks. The sound is lonely and I do not know whose it is.

I look at my hands. Brown, scarred at the knuckles, wet from the steam. I turn them over. Then I look up at the dark window, where a blue-haired man with freckles looks back at me, and I say, low, "Well. Hello, Keanu."

The pan hisses. Two plates. I wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether the morning will still be his.