Marcus Odom

You are standing in Dale Westbrook's kitchen in Dallas with his keys in your fist, and the morning is wrong in a way you can't name. Thirty-eight years old, five-nine, a back that has been loading vans since before you got it. The coffee is the temperature he liked. The truck is outside. Everything works.

That is the trouble. Eleven minutes ago you stood at his window and watched a man across the street carry a child on his shoulders, and what you felt was nothing you could use. You are wearing a body and it fits like a coat from a stranger's closet. So you open the page with its wheel, and your thumb is already moving. Dale's thumb. It is the thirty-fourth time. You don't say why. You pay, and the wheel turns, and the click of it is the last thing Dale hears.

Light, then marble under your feet.

You are on a step, one foot down and one foot behind, mid-stride, and the door is swinging shut at your back with a long pneumatic sigh. Cold air. Sun coming down the block, low and gold, on brick. Your hands are in the middle of something. Blue gloves, one half-peeled, the nitrile snapping at the wrist. A job done ten thousand times. You do it wrong, a half-second fumble, and then you do it again slowly and correctly, and the next ten motions you check, each one, though they have never needed checking.

You are tall. Six-two, and the extra height puts the street farther away. Skinny fat: a soft middle under the scrub shirt, thin arms, legs that feel built for someone lighter. Your feet ache in the clogs, a deep arch ache, hours of it. The back of your neck is tight. The top of your head is stiff, a squared-off tower of hair, and the sides are bare to the skin and cold in the air.

The scrub shirt is against your back, and the cotton gives you something unbidden: a closet in the dark, a hand choosing blue because blue was clean. Sleeve by sleeve, his hands, not yours. He pulled the left on first, always. He stood at the foot of a bed with the alarm still ringing and said a Hail Mary under his breath because his grandmother had, and he didn't think about why.

The drawstring under your thumb opens another door. A woman, years ago, laughing at how he tied it in a double knot. Her name is right there and gone. She still matters. You feel it as a pressure under the ribs, not a picture.

You raise the gloved hand to your mouth before you know you are doing it. Your teeth find the edge of a thumbnail through the nitrile and stop. Bitten short, a habit older than the training. Under the glove the skin is raw at the corners. The wrist remembers a thousand incisions: the small precise tilt, steadiness from the shoulder down. It knows how to hold something very small and not shake.

The mask hangs at your throat, damp from his breath. Your own mouth is dry. Somewhere inside this skin is the tiredness of a man who is not rich, who drives a car with a bad door, who keeps a rosary in a drawer and does not mention it. Nobody is in here to be sorry. You are the only one.

You pull the glove off. You turn your hand over in the sun, brown palm, bitten nails, a surgeon's hand, and you lift your eyes.

"Hello," you say, and his voice comes out lower than you expected, and it's yours now. How long does this one last? Until the wanting comes back. You flex his fingers, one at a time, and wait to feel it.