Kenneth Tran

You are Luis Palomares for less than a minute more, and he is already wrong on you. The cold of the Denver dock is still in his shoulders. His knees ache from a lifetime of lifting that is not yours. You stand in a kitchen before the day has started, one hand flat on the counter, and what sent you back is small and stupid: you reached for the coffee and his hand knew where it was, and you thought, I have been here before. Nothing in him surprises you any more. That is the whole reason. You pay. You spin.

The wheel turns. Then the couch takes you.

Dark room. Soft cushion under your thighs, the whole sagging weight of a man who sits down hard and does not get up. A remote loose in your right hand. The television light moves over your face, blue and then white. It is the middle of the night here, and everyone else is asleep. The show cuts to a bright frame and your spine straightens on its own. You set the remote on the couch arm.

The couch gives you the first thing. The fabric under your palm is nubbly and warm, and it opens a week: Kenneth, Ken, on this couch with a child asleep across his chest, the small damp heat of her breathing through this very shirt, and he does not move for an hour because he cannot bear to. His feeling comes with it, not yours, a tenderness so heavy it is almost fear.

The shirt. Soft, worn thin at the collar. The morning he pulled it from the drawer, years of washing in it, and the rest of the day comes after: a polo with a lanyard in the day, cables looped over his arm, the bag strap cutting his shoulder. Under a desk on his back, the carpet smelling of dust and toner, re-plugging a cable for a woman who never looked down at him. Tonight he came home and changed into this.

Your hand drifts up and runs over your scalp. It does it without asking. The hair is long, parted in the middle, and the gesture is his, a habit older than you. Under it comes a number. Not a figure, a weight: the cards, the loan, a hole so deep he does not look into it. It sits in the stomach like a swallowed stone. Your tongue finds the gold canine, and that opens something else: his mother's dentist, a wedding, a joke he told with that tooth showing.

On the table: a glass, still sweet with the drink or two he has most nights. A vape, which your thumb finds before you have decided. The first pull would come easily. Behind that, a name he has not said aloud lately. The ex. She still matters. A girlfriend sleeps down the hall, and you feel his guilt like a second pulse.

The body is heavy and tired. His back aches low and his belly sits warm against your wrist. His feet are bare on the floor. The small hoop in the left ear is cool against your jaw.

The show goes on. A joke lands. He would have laughed. You do not.

You lift your hands into the screen's light and turn them over. Soft palms, bitten thumbnail, the same scar of nothing, just his. Then you look up and say, in his voice, with the gold tooth catching the light:

"Okay. Kenneth."

How long, you wonder. Until the wanting comes back. Until morning, or four minutes.