Kevin Brennan

You are standing in the dark kitchen of a man who is forty and bald and has a gap in his teeth, and the refrigerator is humming the only note in the house. High desert, the middle of the night. Everyone asleep. You have been him for less than a minute.

He has a good chair. A paid-off truck. A mortgage that never frightens him. None of it was the trouble. The trouble was the gap in his teeth: your tongue found it, pressed into it, and kept finding it, a small wrong doorway. You wanted a different mouth. You do not say that to yourself in so many words. You open the page with the wheel on it and pay.

The wheel turns, and it is dawn, and you are running.

Your pace breaks for two steps. A stumble that never lands. Then the other foot takes the ground and you are moving, arms low, head still, breath showing white in front of your face. Gravel under the soles. Water to your right, flat and gray, a canal with mist lifting off it. Something in your ears, a beat, and under it your own lungs working. On your left wrist a watch face is lit, and it buzzes a split you have no memory of holding.

Your chest is wide and tight and burning clean. The legs are good. You are five-eight and every inch of it is muscle that knows this path. Your heart is a fist going steady.

The hoodie is zipped to the breastbone, and the zipper pull taps your chin. Touching it opens him. Last night the hoodie hung on a kitchen chair, and a woman's voice from the stairs said, take the dark one, it's cold. Sarah. She said it half asleep, and he loved her in that moment so plainly it nearly stopped him on the stairs. He pulled the sleeves down over his knuckles and cracked them, one hand and then the other, because he does that when he is happy and does not know it.

The ring is tight on your finger when you flex. Plain band. A flash: a courthouse, or a porch, a cheap cold bright afternoon, and her laughing at how badly his hands shook. That was nine years ago. His feeling is a warm weight under the ribs, and it is not yours.

You run. The calf with her name on it burns, and the date. 2016. The ink sits in the skin like a held breath. A needle, a stranger's gloved hands, and him grinning at the ceiling the whole time because it hurt exactly the right amount.

Your shoes are worn soft at the heel. Memory comes up through them: a Saturday in the shop, the vest with its pockets full of price tags, the pricing gun heavy in his palm. Straightening boxes on an electronics shelf, forty small televisions' worth of nothing, a manager who did not learn his name for two years. He hated it with a patient, quiet hatred. Nothing to his name, under five thousand dollars. Still he had this: the water, and the hour before anyone needed him.

The pompadour has held. You can feel its height, the stiff lift of it, short at the sides and cold at the neck. The stubble itches in the wind.

The watch buzzes again. You slow. You let the pace go, and your breath comes ragged and glad. You hold up your hand into the gray light and turn it. Broad knuckles. The band. A scrape healing across the thumb that you did not give him.

Mist moves off the canal. You lift your eyes.

"Hello," you say, in a voice that is warm and a little rough, and your tongue finds no gap at all. "Hello, Kevin."

You do not know how long he lasts. Past this bend, or the next, or a month of mornings. The wanting is asleep in you, for now.