Marcus Odom

You are Grant Mallory, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you hate how much of him you can feel. The student's body sits in a chair in a Miami dawn. The window behind the screen is going grey. His freckled forearms are cold. His bald scalp is cold. The wheel is on the screen, and your thumb, his thumb, is a quarter inch off the key.

You have nothing against him. He is simply a body that works. Six-two, the knees don't hurt, the blue eyes see fine. But he is a student, and you spent your first forty seconds finding out that his whole day is a lecture he has not read for and a girl's name on his phone. Nothing in him wants anything you want. You are standing in a life that is all furniture. And the wanting has come back the way it always does, as a pressure behind the sternum, a small hunger with no food for it. 1442. You press.

It is the middle of the night, and you are standing in a kitchen with a fork halfway to your mouth.

The light is a bulb in a glass dome, yellow and hot on the crown of your head. Noodles on the fork, a paper carton in your left hand, warm through the cardboard. A coat is on you, heavy, canvas, smelling of dust and cold air. The window in front of you is black and gives back a man, and you don't look yet.

The coat comes first. Its cuffs are stiff with something dried, and the cuff against your wrist opens it. It is this morning, long before light. He sits on the edge of a bed in a trailer, and the floor is cold through his socks. He puts on the jeans first, one leg and then the other, the denim already gritty. He is thinking about a trench: the clay at three feet, the way the mini excavator coughs when it's cold. Boots by the door, laces still knotted from yesterday. He doesn't untie them. He jams his heel in. Then the coat off its nail, and the left pocket has the tin in it. His thumb knows the tin's weight before he knows he's reaching. Your own thumb goes to it now. Wintergreen, and the pinch behind the lower lip, and the small sting he likes. He is not thinking about anything while he does it. That is the feeling: a man for whom getting dressed is a prayer he doesn't know he's saying.

The counter edge presses your hip. Under your fingers, paper, a corner of an envelope, and it gives you a woman's handwriting from years ago, a birthday card, and then not a card but a porch light, her laughing at something he said badly. He didn't mind being laughed at by her. The ache arrives whole and has no name in him except her name, which you don't say. Then it's gone, like a hand lifted off.

The floor under your boots is tile, cold up through the soles. Your thighs are heavy, spent in the good way. Eleven hours of the shovel are stored in the long muscles of your back, and your shoulders carry the swing of it still, the lift and throw of wet earth onto the pile. Your palms are hard. The calluses sit at the base of each finger, and when you close your hand on the fork they fit it like a handle. Your jaw is tired from chewing and from a day of gritting. Your face itches and your free hand wants to go up to it. You let it. Fingertips on the goatee, the beard thick and a little damp, then the cleft in the chin, a soft dent your thumb finds without looking, worn smooth by years of the same touch. He did this in church once, in a pew, in a tie. Your own mother's hand, no, his mother's, came down and moved his wrist. Nothing was said. You feel the old shame, mild and warm.

Sunday, the smell of wax and wool. He kneels because his knees remember kneeling, and he asks for something small and specific, and it is for money, a little more put away, enough for a lot of land. The number in his head is a clean one. You feel it sit in him like a stone in a good pocket.

Then the fork. It is still in the air, and the noodle slides on it. You lower it. You set it on the counter, and the click of metal on laminate is loud in the quiet. The trailer ticks around you as it cools. Outside, nothing, miles of sage and dark.

You look at your hand. It is broad, brown, the knuckles dry and cracked at the creases, the nails square and clean at the edges where grit is packed beneath. You turn it over. The palm is a map of work. You close it and open it, and it obeys at once, a thing that has never once been asked to be anyone else's.

You look up into the black window, at a stranger with a cleft in his chin, and he looks back with your eyes.

"Hey, Marcus," you say, quietly, trying it, to see what the mouth does.

The dip is still in your lip. The noodles are getting cold. Somewhere under the sternum the small hunger is already turning over, asking how long, asking whether tomorrow you will still be standing in his boots.