Manuel Zamora

The reason is the stairs. Terrence Obi-Walker's knees are twenty-nine and fine. What I can't stand is the load-in ramp behind the theater, the four a.m. call, the way he coils cable over and under without thinking, and how I, inside him, can only watch it get done. Under the work light I hold a roll of gaffer tape and feel nothing, and I know the feeling that comes next. I've known it 1148 times. He's lean, quick and easy to wear, and I'm already bored of him. He was mine for less than a minute. I open the site. The wheel is waiting, and I pay.

Then it turns.

Air changes first, warm and dusty, smelling of cut wheat and rain that hasn't fallen. I'm sitting down. A seat bolster presses my hips, and my belly rests against a steering wheel's lower arc. My right arm is lifted toward a phone on the dash. My left hand holds a loop of cable on my thigh. The screen glows a map. Beyond the open door, the sky is a bruise stacking black, and the stubble field has gone yellow.

The hand at the phone has already moved wrong. A half-second stumble, then slowly, correctly: thumb, mount, screen. Then again, checked. Ten more times, each one checked, on a job that hasn't needed checking in years.

I touch the cable and a flash arrives that is not mine. A charger cord, a woman's laughter in a kitchen, her voice saying *you always keep the good one in the car for everybody else*. It tastes like loss, recent and unsettled. Her name is nowhere in it, only the ache.

The sweatshirt's quarter-zip rubs my throat, and the gray knit gives me a morning. His thick fingers pull it over his head in a dark bedroom. He pauses at a small crucifix on the dresser, a habit, not devotion. He wants the day to go well. He pulls on the jeans, wincing a little at the left knee. Cold coffee. Shoes by the door, worn flat at the heels.

My tongue finds the gap between my front teeth. His memory flickers on it: a school photo, a boy refusing to close his mouth, a father laughing, *leave it, it's yours*. Under my nose the moustache itches. Under my ribs the body is solid, a little soft, tired in the lower back, with strong forearms and calluses on the wheel-side palm. At forty-six he knows sitting still. He knows long roads and strangers' stories and the quiet between the pickup and the drop.

The steering wheel is worn smooth at ten and two. I grip it, and he gives me a savings account, a number he checks too often. It isn't much, and it's his, put away mile by mile against something he hasn't named.

I lift my hand from the wheel and turn it over. It is broad and brown, the nails square. It's not Terrence's. It belongs to no one I've ever been.

I look up into the windshield's reflection, at the moustache and the gap, and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello, Manuel."

The thunderhead leans closer, and the phone chimes with a ride. I don't know how long he'll stay mine, or when the wanting will start again.