Malik Dorian Haddad

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films where the sister wakes up in the brother's body. The threads at two in the morning, everyone swearing it happened to a cousin. Tonight is a Wednesday, nothing on, the work day gone gray behind you, and you are on a page with a wheel on it. vessel.cards. You did not believe it. You pay anyway, because wanting something for years makes you stupid in a patient way. You press spin. The wheel clicks through its colors. It stops.

Dark. A pillow under your cheek, cool on one side, warm on the other. A rectangle of blue six inches from your eyes, and a thumb stopped on it, and the thumb is yours. You start it moving. It is faster than you meant, steadier, flicking past whatever he stopped on, and you do not read any of it.

The room is close and smells of laundry that has been worn once more than it should. A glass on the nightstand. A tangle of charger cords. Through the window, a street lamp, nothing else. No cars. Small-town quiet, the kind with a weight to it.

You are long. Your feet find the end of the bed and hang there. Your hip is pinned under you and an ache runs along it. There is a softness at the middle, a belly that rests on the mattress when you breathe out, and under it a thin frame that never got the muscle it was owed. Your jaw is smooth against the pillow. When you touch your scalp, the hair lies combed flat, thin, and the skin shows through.

The shirt is soft with washing. Your fingers pinch the hem and something opens.

Morning, this morning. A gray collar buttoned too tight, the mirror fogged over the sink. He is thinking about the corner office, about the door that stays closed, about the calendar he keeps for a man who never says thank you. He pulls the black sweater on over the collar because the office runs cold, and the sleeve cuffs catch on his knuckles. He is not unhappy. He is tired in a way that has stopped being a feeling and turned into weather.

The sheet under your palm is rough, and the next thing arrives whole. A small hand around two of his fingers. A daughter, or a son, he thinks of the child as the one, simply the one, walking him along the counter of the closed diner on Main, because the stoplight is red and nothing is coming, and the child wants to wait for green anyway. He waits. He loves the rule. He loves being a man a small person trusts to keep a rule. It is the warmest thing in him and it goes through your chest like a swallowed coal.

Your thumb finds the phone's edge. Under it, a different flash: a girlfriend's laugh down a hallway, the dishwasher running, the two of them arguing gently over money, the savings he guards, a little put away, never touched. The number is a quiet pride. He checks it more than he admits.

And one he keeps from everyone: in the parking lot at lunch, in the car, with the engine off, he reads. Pages of a notebook that no one has seen. Nothing grand. Lines. He folds it away before anyone could knock on the glass.

You breathe. The ache in the hip, the freckles you can feel only as warmth under the blue light, the long arm, the heartbeat going steady and a little slow. A big night once or twice a month, his liver remembers, and a Thursday headache that is a rumor of one.

You lift the phone away. You turn your hand over in the dark, the palm pale against the lamp, the fingers longer than you expect, and you look at it for a long time.

Then you look up, and you say it out loud, in his voice, low, to the room: "Okay. Hello."

Downstairs, or down the hall, a floorboard settles. You do not know how long you get. An hour, a year, the length of a breath. The wanting is already there, quiet, turning like the wheel.