Marcus Ellery

You are standing in a stranger's kitchen in Nashville, in the dark, and your knees hurt. Dennis Pruett's knees. Sixty years of them, and a courier's back that has learned to carry the weight of a hundred paper bags up other people's porches. You came in from a night run an hour ago and the bags are still in the car. The refrigerator hums. You open it for the light, and there is a casserole dish with a note on the foil in a woman's handwriting, and you cannot make yourself lift the foil.

It is not that he was bad. He was a body that worked. But his stubble keeps being gray under your thumb, and his sleep is thin, and tonight at the sink you heard him, the whole of him, sigh, and it was not your sigh, and it was not his either. It was the sound of a man who has done it all and is waiting for more. You are not waiting. You have your phone, and the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin. You watch it tick past names you will never know.

Then a bright frame, and a couch under your back.

The room is dark, and the television is the only weather in it. You are sunk low, feet up on a table, and the remote is loose in your right hand. Your breath comes slow and deep, a big man's breath, a long ribcage rising. You sit up straight. You set the remote on the arm of the couch. Something on the screen was funny a second ago and you do not laugh.

The couch is rough wool under your palm, worn through at the cushion edge where someone picks at it. Touch it and it opens. A girl's voice, close: *we'll get a new one when we're rich*, and him laughing, the two of them carrying it up the stairs of the brownstone, his shoulder scraping the wall, her hand on his belt loop to steer him. It is his happiness, not yours. It tastes like sweat and the spring.

The shirt against your back is soft, washed thin. He put it on yesterday after the shower, no, this morning, no, before the shift: you feel the wet towel over his shoulders, the hall light, the left arm in first because the left shoulder aches after years of lifting sheet pans. The pants are drawstring, loose at the hip. The socks are gray and warm from the radiator.

Your thumb finds the edge of a nail and your teeth are already there. He bites them. They are ragged, and the habit comes up out of the hands without asking. Under it, a different morning: a dark kitchen, ovens ticking as they heat, the cold smell of flour and yeast, the cash drawer, a long rack of trays cooling. Four a.m. is his noon. His hands know the dough before you do. They know how to turn it, fold it, and feel when it is ready.

There is a mug on the table with a coffee ring in the bottom, and when you look at it you get the church basement, folding chairs, his mother's voice singing flat and unashamed, and under that a prayer he says before sleeping that he has told no one he still says. And a girl's name that is not the one in the apartment, a name he does not say, a ring he almost bought. There is a little money put away, and a plan for it. You do not want the plan.

The room is quiet. A car passes outside and its light slides over the ceiling.

You raise your hands to the glow of the screen and turn them over. They are long, the palms hard, the nails chewed down, and flour is still in the creases of the knuckles though he scrubbed them. You lift your eyes.

"Hello, Marcus," you say, and his voice is warm and low in the dark room, and it is not afraid.

You do not know how long. Until the wanting comes back, until the first thing this body cannot do. You flex the fingers. Tomorrow he would have been up at three.