Kenji Nakamura

You have read the threads at two in the morning for as long as you can remember. A man wakes in a stranger's kitchen. A woman looks at her hands. You have always read them the same way, with your chest tight, wanting it and knowing better. Tonight is nothing. Work is done, the scrolling is done, and the screen is the only light. There is a wheel on it, and you pay, because you do not believe it.

You spin.

The wheel clicks down and you are lying on your face.

There is no travel and no warning. There is a pillow against your mouth and a weight pinning your chest to a mattress. Your right arm hangs off the edge, the blood gone out of it. The breath you are taking is ragged, and then it is even, and that is the whole of it. You are in.

Your arm draws itself up. You do not lift it. The body rolls onto its back, and the hands fold on your sternum like a man laid out. Some part of you knows he has never slept this way. He sleeps like a man falling.

A lamp is on somewhere. Light comes in through the gap in the curtains. You smell carpet and old laundry and, faintly, coffee gone cold.

The shirt is cotton, worn thin, and it clings at the collar where you sweated into it. You touch the hem and something opens. It is a drawer in the dark, and his wife's hand has put this shirt in it, folded. Last night he took it out without turning on the light so he would not wake her. He is ashamed that it is the third night this week. His fingers know the neckline. Head first, left arm, right arm, tug at the belly where he is softer than he was at thirty. It is not vanity. It is a small flinch he has every time.

The sheet is under your palm, and it gives you the other thing. Listings. A kitchen table, the laptop's glare, a cursor over the word Apply, and sixty applications that came back as silence. He tells his wife it is going fine. He says it lightly, and then goes to the lanai and chews a toothpick down to splinters. Your jaw is working on nothing. Your tongue finds the place his teeth keep going back to.

Under your fingers is the wedding band, a plain ring, warm. You turn it with your thumb and a woman laughs inside you, a long time ago, in a stairwell. She is not his wife. She is the one who got away. He still drives past a street with her name in it, and he has never said so to anyone. The ache is there for a breath, and it is his, and it is heavy.

Your back is flat on the mattress. His lumbar complains, a dull knot low on the left, forty-two years of sitting. Your belly rises and falls. Your thighs are soft and tired. Your feet are bare, and the carpet under your heels holds a morning in Honolulu: red dirt tracked in, the tin roof ticking as the heat comes, two small voices calling for him from the next room. He is the one who gets up. He is always the one who gets up.

There is a small prayer too, a few words in a low voice with incense, from his mother's house. His lips shape the first of them before you stop them.

Then it quiets. The room is early and still.

You lift your hands and look at them. They are broad across the knuckle, the nails short. The ring catches the lamp. You turn them over, palms up, and close the fingers. They close.

You look up at the ceiling, and then at nothing, and your voice comes out in his register, rough with sleep.

"Oh. It worked."

Somewhere under it the question is already there. You do not know how long this one lasts, whether the wanting stays quiet, or whether you wake tomorrow still him.