Marcus Whitlock

You are in Phillip Nguyen's body, standing at a kitchen counter in Houston, and your arches ache. Five foot four of him is mostly tendon. Eleven hours of picking have left his shoulders in knots, and his thumbs are cracked from tape and cardboard. You have worn him for less than a minute. Everyone in his house is asleep, and the refrigerator hums over a glass of water you have not touched.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He is light and quick and nobody looks at him. When you lifted the glass, his hand knew exactly how much it weighed, as if it were already apologizing for being small. You had wanted to be somebody who has to duck for doors. The wanting came up through his ribs like a swallowed coin, and you put the glass down and opened the page. The wheel is already turning, and its ticking is the only noise in the house.

It stops.

Your breath tears, then smooths out in a single pull. The mattress takes you whole. You are face-down, one arm hanging into cold air, and the sheets smell of cocoa butter and old laundry. A strip of sodium light lies across the back of your neck. Your body wakes up in a different place, heavier and wider and warm to the bone.

You roll onto your back, and the arm climbs up by itself. Your hands fold on your chest, a corpse's pose. Nothing in him has ever slept that way. The cotton of the T-shirt is soft from a hundred washings and sticks to the small belly. The sweatpants are bunched at the knee.

Then the shirt gives you something, and it is not yours. A morning, bright, a week or a year ago: he stands in a hallway with a cold coffee, and a small hand pulls at the hem of this shirt. *Daddy, up.* He lifts her with one arm, easily, because the body has done it a thousand times. The feeling is not a picture. It is a hot, stupid pride that makes the throat tight.

The ring is cool against your sternum where your hands are folded. Your thumb finds it and turns it, and the flash is bigger. A church basement, folding chairs, a woman laughing with her hand over her mouth. Her name is in his mouth before you can think it, and it is nothing like a word. It is the shape his whole face makes. Behind it comes an office at night, big prints pinned to the wall, and the particular dread of being the one who signs. He carried that every day and told no one how heavy it was. Under that, a decision, years old and still new each morning: no drink, not ever. His hands remember the refusal. They know how to curl around a seltzer can at a party.

The pillow gives up his hair, the short twists pressed flat on one side. The beard scratches your jaw when you swallow. One eye is drifting, you can feel it, a slight lazy slide outward that he has spent a lifetime correcting in photographs. In the dark you let it drift.

He does not know. He never will. There is nothing left of him in here to know it.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over, palms, knuckles, the ring. They are broad, and they are warm. They are bigger than anything you've held in months. You lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and rough with sleep, and it fills the room. "Okay. Hello."

The pipes tick in the radiator. Somewhere down the hall a child turns over. You do not know how long you get to keep this, or when the wanting comes back for you.