Leonard Bearcloud

You are Marco Delgado, and you have been Marco for seven minutes, and already you know what's wrong with him. His phone sits on the bedside table in a city that is awake while you are barely in it. The goatee itches. The five-foot-five of him is fine. The sales deck for nine o'clock is fine. What is wrong is that you stood at his kitchen counter holding a mug of his coffee, and it tasted like nothing at all, and the whole bright city beyond the window looked like a thing painted for someone else. You wanted a man with a smell. You wanted weight. So you open the page with the wheel and your thumb is already moving.

It turns. It clicks down.

The fluorescent tube is humming. That is first, a thin electric buzz right over your skull, and then the heat: a warm breath out of the dryer's open mouth, on your face, on your forearm reaching in. You are crouched on one knee, and the knee knows it, a dull old complaint from the concrete. A sock is in your left hand. Your right is deep in the drum, fingers closing on cloth that is almost too warm to hold.

You pull the load out. It comes in a hot tumble against your chest and you drop it in the basket, and the heat leaves a flush on your wrists.

The flannel on your back is soft with washing. It tugs across your shoulders when you reach, and the memory comes up through it: a man's hands, yours and not yours, doing the buttons in the dark of a bedroom, one at a time, because the cuffs are stiff. Beside him a woman sleeps with her hair across the pillow. He rolled the sleeves twice, as he always does, forearm showing. He felt pleased with nothing in particular, only the day ahead, the route, the weight of a van door.

The sock between your fingers is wool, gone thin at the heel. A flash: a small child's foot, then another, three children in a row on a couch, and he is pulling socks onto them while they kick, laughing, and the feeling is so large and plain that your throat closes.

Your thumb finds your cuticle without being told. It picks. It has always picked, in traffic, in waiting rooms, and the sting is old and almost comfortable. The ring on that hand is a plain band, worn smooth. You turn it with your thumb and a whole summer comes: a porch, a screen door, a woman laughing at him because he cried at the vows, and the river smell of the city after rain.

Under it all the body is honest with you. The belly presses against your thighs when you crouch. The lower back has an opinion. The hands are strong and thick and quick, and they are already moving, already sorting, squaring corners, a skill laid down by years, a thing the drawers upstairs never see.

Another memory, a quieter one, comes up from the shelf of detergent. A girl he knew before his wife, a long time ago, a bus bench, a promise nobody kept. He does not think of her often. He thinks of her now, and so do you, and it is not yours, and you let it pass.

You lift your hand out of the warmth and look at it. Brown, broad, the knuckles scuffed, a bitten edge of skin by the thumb. You turn it over. You close it.

You look up at the buzzing light and say, quietly, "Well. Hello."

The tube hums. The dryer ticks as it cools. You wonder how long he will fit you, and when the wanting will start again, and whether tomorrow you will still be standing in this basement, or anywhere.