Malik Jerome Bryant

You are leaving Mateo because of the stairs. The lab building has four flights, and this morning, mid-sentence with a colleague, you reached the second landing and your gap-toothed mouth said a word in a voice you did not choose. He apologizes for everything. He has a chemist's patience and a chemist's small hands, and you have been in him for less than a minute of your own counting, and already you are tired of reaching for high shelves that are not there. At five-foot-five the world is a counter you look up at. You want to be someone the doorframes respect. That is all you will admit, standing in the Nashville late morning with a cold coffee going bitter in his fist.

You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down its teeth.

Cool air, a fan turning somewhere. Your feet are bare on shag carpet and you are standing at the foot of a bed with your hand reaching for a button, and then your hand stops, flat against your chest. Ribs under the cotton. Heartbeat, slower than Mateo's, heavier. A tie hangs on either side of your neck like two black tongues. The lamp is on, the window is blue with early light. Everything is taller. The floor is a long way down.

Your fingers undo the buttons, and they know how. They go back up in order, no hunting. The tie lifts, crosses, folds into a knot you have never seen, a thing that is not a Windsor and not anything, and your hands do it without you.

The cuff is rolled, and the fabric brushes the tattoo, and something opens. Eleanor. The script is half under the sleeve. A date. A woman before this one, a long hospital hallway, a hand he held until it stopped being held. It does not arrive as a picture. It arrives as a weight under the sternum, grief shaped like a name, and he has carried it so quietly that his girlfriend sleeping in the next room has never once been jealous of it.

The shirt against your back. He ironed it last night, badly, on a towel, because the board is broken. Sleeve by sleeve, his morning comes: left arm, right arm, the fabric still warm from the iron's last breath, the buttons done fast in the dark so as not to wake her. He misses one. He always misses one when he is thinking about the day.

The carpet under your toes. He picked it. He argued for it. The house on posts, the red dirt, the tin roof drumming in rain: that is the other house, the one he grew up near, his uncle's, and the carpet smells of this apartment's new glue. Prayer, five times, the rug rolled in the closet corner. Fajr is already done today; the forehead remembers the floor. He has not touched a drink in his life. He quit smoking at twenty-three, and your lungs, his lungs, hold the clean scar of it, a craving that still taps at the glass some mornings.

Your thumb goes to your mouth. The nail is already bitten to the quick. You did not tell it to. It is what his hands do when he is thinking of nothing, and they are thinking of a job: framing that must be inspected by noon, a client in a good suit, the tie for the meeting. Sawdust in the sinuses. Shoulders that carry sheets of plywood like paper. Forearms strong enough to feel like someone else's decision.

There is a freckled face in the dark window, nose and cheeks, a short neat beard, blue hair pulled low at the nape. Nobody in Nashville has ever looked at you like this, like you could carry the house.

You look at your hands. Turn them over. Dry palms, wide, broken nails.

You look up.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and unhurried, a room you could live in. "Okay. Hello."

The wheel is already somewhere behind your teeth, patient, ticking. You do not know how long this one lasts.