Kenji Maddox

You are standing in Gary Lee Hostetler's kitchen in the middle of a Tuesday morning, and his knees hurt. The nose he broke once sits crooked under your eyes. The coffee has gone cold in a mug that says something about a feed store. You have had him for less than a minute, and you already know what's wrong with him. He is a man whose life is finished and arranged: the truck in the drive, the gray in the goatee, the quiet of a house where nothing needs you. You thought it would be enough to be somebody solid. You can stand in that quiet. What you can't stand is how easily he fits you, like a coat you were always going to end up in. So you set the mug down and wake the page with a thumb that has a trucker's callus on it. The wheel turns, and you let it.

Then the stirring stops mid-circle. It starts again the other way, because that is the direction you stir in.

Heat comes up off the pan against your face. Blue flame, a wooden spatula, rice and egg and something scorched sweetly at the edges. Your back is to a room you haven't seen yet. You are tall, and you feel the ceiling lamp close above your hair. Shoulders wide and tired. A hum in the arches of the feet. You salt the pan without tasting it, because your hand knows how much, and you don't. Then you open the cupboard and take down a second plate. You set it beside the first, and you don't know why. It's as though someone else gave the order.

The shirt starts first. Cotton, thin at the collar, black from too many washes. It is warm against your spine, and with it comes a morning: his arms going into the sleeves in a dark apartment, the smell of detergent, his thumb catching the hem. He is eighteen and pleased with how the shirt sits across his chest. He is a little ashamed of being pleased. Then the jeans, stiff at the knees. A belt loop he always misses. A phone buzzing in a pocket, a girl's name he doesn't answer, and under it a flat ache he carries around the way you carry a stone in a shoe.

The spatula handle is worn smooth where his thumb goes. Through it comes his mother's kitchen, a hot summer, someone teaching him to cook an egg. Then the flight line at dusk. Ear defenders pressed down on his neck, the cargo plane's ramp lowering like a mouth, the reflective belt slapping his hip. He is the youngest on the crew. When a sergeant barks at him his hands stutter on the strap, the buckle slipping three times before it catches. He hates that. He repeats the checklist under his breath, and the stutter eases.

The plate is cool and rough-glazed under your fingertips. The second plate. You see her sitting across from him, laughing with her mouth full, and it was the last good dinner before the end of it. He had been setting two places for weeks without thinking. Tonight he set one on purpose, and some part of his body kept the old habit. Or you did. It is hard to say whose hand it was.

Through the window comes the glow of a vending machine at the end of the lane, and the hum of it. The floor is cold through his socks. His knuckles are scraped, and his forearms are strong and ache pleasantly from lifting. You can feel the scar through his eyebrow tugging when you frown. He prays, you find, in the shower, in plain words, because somebody once told him God likes plain words.

You lift your hands off the counter and turn them over. They are younger than anything you've worn. The palms are rough and the nails are clean.

You look up at the dark window, where a stranger's face looks back, and you say, "Okay. Hello."

The rice hisses. Somewhere in you the wanting is already asleep, and you wonder how long it will stay that way.