Liam Gorecki

You are Harlan Pickett, and you are tired in the way a man gets when the house is asleep and his knees are not. Sixty-four. The kitchen light is off. You sit at a table that isn't yours, in a bald head that isn't yours, with a pack of cigarettes you have no wish to open. His wife is down the hall breathing slowly. Your hands, which are his, are folded on the oilcloth, and they are fine. They work. The knees work. Nothing is wrong with him.

That is the trouble. Nothing is wrong, and you have walked every room of it. You know where the coffee is. Less than a minute of him and you are already weary of his quiet. A man that settled makes you want to be someone with something still ahead of him. So you go to the page with the wheel, and you pay, and it turns.

Then the show cuts to a bright frame and you are on a couch.

The room is dark and the TV is the only weather in it. Your spine finds the cushion and you sit up straight, all at once, the way a man does when his name is called. The remote is in your right hand. You set it down on the couch arm. Heavy body, heavy and warm, and a belly under the sweatshirt that rises when you breathe. The air smells of beer gone flat, and of a cigarette smoked outside and carried in on cloth.

On the screen a man says something and a laugh track answers. Some part of this body was about to laugh. You feel the place where it would have gone, a small tightening under the ribs, and you let it pass unused.

Now the sweatshirt, against your forearms: soft, pilled, a little stiff at the cuffs. The cold side of the can on the end table. And the jeans under your palm, gritty with something dark that doesn't wash out, and it comes.

Morning, and these jeans pulled up off the floor of a closet. A woman's voice from the bathroom, tired and kind, saying he should wash them for once. His laugh. Hers, with a toothbrush in it. The belt buckle cold on his stomach, the belly he is a little ashamed of and a little proud of, because it sits on a body that can lift an engine block. Under a raised car in a garage with a steep driveway, rag in the back pocket, the lift groaning. He loves the moment the bolt gives. He has never told anyone that. A small clean surrender of metal, and his whole day opens.

The ring is on your left hand. You turn it with your thumb, and it opens a different door. Her again, in white light, and a church that smelled of wax. His mother crying in the third pew. The promise he made, and meant, and the drinking that came afterward anyway. Nights like this one. Lights off. Can after can. Then the other woman, the one before, the recent one, her name in his chest like a swallowed stone. He still checks his phone for her. He has not told his wife that either.

Your knuckles ache faintly. Your shoulders are enormous with strength and gone slack with the evening. Twenty-seven years old and already a man who keeps secrets in his body.

You lift both hands into the television light and look at them. Thick fingers, a scrape across one knuckle, grease worked into the creases. A mole you can't see but can feel, high on the cheek, when you smile. You turn the hands over. Palms pale. The ring catches blue.

Then you look up, and you say, to the dark and whoever is in it, "Well. Hello, Liam."

The laugh track roars again, and this time you don't answer it. You wonder how long he will fit you, and when the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be sitting here when the show ends.