Kyle Brennecke

The pastor's house is asleep, and so is the whole street of it. I am standing in his kitchen in his socks, with the stove clock green and the refrigerator ticking. For less than a minute I have been Thomas Brannigan, and the hymnal voice in his chest has been trying to teach me to be sorry. He has a sermon in the drawer and a casserole dish on the counter that somebody's widow left. Everyone who comes to him wants him to be gentle with them. I wanted to find out what it is like to want something nobody forgives. So I pay, and the wheel turns.

Then the dark is a bedroom and I am on my side. A phone is six inches from my face, and blue light sits on one cheek. My thumb has stopped mid-scroll, and now it starts again, faster, flicking past everything he stopped on. His breath is warm in a mattress that sags toward the middle. A lamp is on somewhere behind me. Past the window the night is wet and orange.

The pillowcase under my ear is thin and smells of drugstore detergent. A flash comes up through it. He is standing in a hallway in this same black T-shirt, and a woman is leaving. He doesn't stop her. He says "okay" and hates the word for years. She was the one who got away, and her name is still in the phone, down in the contacts where he scrolls past it.

My thumb finds the glass. The case is rubbery and cracked at one corner. He has pressed that corner with the same thumb a thousand nights, thinking about a table with a laptop and job listings and a rejection email that began *We regret*. Eleven applications, and every one was a no. A girlfriend is asleep across town. He is kind to her and tired in front of her, and he doesn't tell her how little is in the account.

My right leg is bouncing against the mattress. I never told it to. Under the cotton the legs are thick and hard from some old habit of lifting, and my shoulder aches where it holds the weight of me. The sheet at my feet carries a smell, and with it an afternoon at a church: wooden pew, a mother's rosary, his knees learning to kneel. He still crosses himself, and he has not prayed for months.

The sweatpants are soft and worn at the knee. His hands put them on this morning, left leg first, and the drawstring was already knotted. The shirt's collar rubs a place on my neck. I touch it and feel ink under my fingertip, a bad little mark. Another is on the back of my hand. I remember a night, a friend, a needle, and a laugh that turned to regret by Tuesday. He has worn long sleeves in January to hide the regret and found there is no hiding it in Miami.

I put the phone face down on the quilt. My thumb is still moving, rubbing at nothing. I lift my hand into the light and turn it over. Freckles run up the wrist, and the knuckles are scraped pale. It is steady, and not mine.

I look up. "Okay," I say, and his voice is rougher than I expected. The leg won't stop. I think: how long will I have this one, and when will the wanting come back?