Kevin Dombrowski

You are standing in a kitchen in Phoenix, in the dark, with the refrigerator open and its light on your chest. Isaiah Colburn's body is nineteen and has never once been tired. You have had it for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with it. It is too clean. Nothing in it is wrong, nothing aches, and there is nothing to push against. You drink milk from the carton and feel it go down a throat that has no story. The house is asleep. Somewhere down the hall a man you don't know is breathing in a bed you have no claim to. You put the carton back, shut the door, and stand in the new dark. Then you take your phone out and the wheel is there, as it always is, waiting.

You spin.

The wind stops.

It stops all at once, as if a hand had closed on it, and you are standing on boards that are not the kitchen's linoleum. The air is thick and green and smells of cut grass and iron. A bulb buzzes at your shoulder. A screen door knocks against its frame behind you, once, twice, and settles. Ahead is a field gone the color of a bruise, and a wall of cloud crossing it. Your chest is heavy and warm, your breath comes short, and there is a taste of tobacco at the back of your tongue.

Your hands hang loose. The chin is already up. You step off the porch toward the weather.

The hoodie is the first thing to speak. The cotton is pilled soft at the cuffs, and when the sleeve drags across your wrist you are in a morning, his morning, in the dark, in a room with a girl asleep and the blanket kicked off her shoulder. He took the hoodie off a chair without turning on a light. It was her chair, and her sweater lay under it. He felt a small, stupid tenderness, and he put the hoodie on over a black shirt that smelled of fryer oil. The cuffs were already cold.

The jeans hold the next one. The stiff knees and the worn seat carry a night in a walk-in at the end of a double, his forehead against a shelf of stacked hotel pans, the cold coming up through the denim. He was counting to a hundred because the number made the shaking in his hands stop. It did stop. He was proud of that and told no one.

Your boots take the weight. They are heavy, steel-toed, and resoled twice. Under the left one the board gives a little, and with the give comes the porch itself in daylight, a lawn chair, a cigarette in the first week of summer. Beside him a woman who is not the girlfriend laughs with her feet up on the rail. She is the old one, the one who still matters. He lit her cigarette with his own and neither of them said anything good. The wanting in it is his, thick and sore, and it lands in your chest like a swallowed stone.

Your fingers move to the left forearm without being asked. A thumb finds the lettering under the skin, a name and a date, and the date goes through you like a dropped tray: a hospital hallway, his own breath, a plastic chair. You don't get the whole of it. You get the chair, the vending machine's hum, and a grief so large and patient that you almost stop walking.

The pack is in the pocket. The corners are soft and the cellophane crackles, and your hand knows exactly how many are left. Your lungs know it too. They ask for one, tight and pleading and old beyond eighteen.

The nose ring tugs cold against the edge of your nostril. The hair brushes your ears and the collar. The stubble has days on it. The belly sits solid and warm under the sweatshirt, and your knees ache a little from the line, from standing on tile for years that he has already lived. You are strong in the shoulders and wide in the back, and your hands, you can tell, are quick with a knife.

Then the wind comes back, a gust that lifts the hair off your neck, and you stop in the wet grass and bring both hands up in front of you. The knuckles are thick. There are scars you did not choose, and ink on the wrists, and a pulse in the thumb that is not yours. You turn them over. They are warm, ordinary, and rough, and they are yours.

You lift your eyes to the black edge of the field, where the first lightning opens.

"Okay," you say, in a voice with gravel in it. "Let's see how long you last."