Marcus Bell

The rain got into the panel somehow — that's what they'll say after, some story about a monsoon crack in the roof seal, water tracing conduit down into a junction box that hadn't been up to code since before he started working there. Nobody will mention the flash. Nobody but you will know there was a flash at all, white and total, coming from behind him like a photograph taken by something enormous.

You know this kitchen because he's told you about it a hundred times over the phone, complained about the walk-in that doesn't hold temp, the sous chef who breathes through his mouth. You know the gravel yard out back because he sent you a picture of it once, saguaros black against a sky the color of a bruise, and said *this is what I look at during my break, man, this is my whole view.* You didn't think you'd ever stand in it. You didn't think standing meant this — his knees under you, his weight, his hands lifting up in front of his face like he's never seen hands before, because you never have, not these ones, not from this side.

The breaker box behind you is still smoking. Small flame in there, guttering, dying on its own. Through the window the yard is exactly like the picture. Blinding. Still.

You have him for one day and you already know what you're going to do with the first hour of it, which is nothing — just stand there in his damp coat, in his skin, feeling how his heart is going too fast and then, gradually, isn't. He's got piercings warm from your own body heat, small metal in his ears, the nose ring cold when your top lip brushes it by accident. You laugh, and it comes out as his laugh, a sound you've heard your whole life from the outside, that you now feel happen in your own chest for the first time.

Line cooks are yelling for him by name — his name, not yours, and no one else's — and there's a ticket rail with orders curling under a heat lamp and somewhere close a pan is one second from catching. You know how to do this. Not because you've ever worked a line, but because he has, ten thousand times, and something of that is sitting here in the muscle, patient, waiting to be used like a language you didn't know you spoke until your mouth opened.

You cook. You burn your forearm reaching past a flame you should've gone around — his arm, already scarred there in two places from other days, other fires, so the new mark just joins a family it already had. You don't cry out. You want to. He wouldn't, so you don't.

On break you sit on an overturned bus tub in the gravel yard, and you take his phone out of the black apron and you scroll to a name you already know is going to be there. *Danielle.* No new messages. You almost text her something — hey, it's Marcus, I miss you, I'm sorry — and your thumb hovers a long time over the letters before you put the phone away, because that isn't yours to spend, even today, even like this. Especially today.

It's the last thing he'd want you to waste him on, and you know that the way you know his hands now, the way you know the exact tired slope of his shoulders in this apron: because he's your brother, and you've spent a whole life learning him without ever once expecting to end up inside the lesson.

By the end of service the sky over the yard has gone the flat orange of a stove element cooling down. You stand at the pass one more time, tickets gone quiet, and you look at his hands under the fluorescent light — burn, old scar, three small rings, nothing remarkable to anyone else on earth — and you think: this is what he is when nobody's watching him be your brother. Just a guy at work. Just a body doing a job, straightening up after every hit the day gives it.

You give the hands back before the next flash comes, whenever it comes, wherever you'll be. You don't get to choose the moment. You only get to have used this one well.

He'll wake up with a burn he doesn't remember taking, on an arm that already had two scars for company, and a strange calm sitting where panic should be, and no way of knowing that for one day, something that loved him stood exactly where he stands, and didn't waste a single hour of it wanting to be anywhere else.