Marlon Deshields

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The griddle is dead in front of you and your arm hurts from the wrist down, the good kind of hurt, the kind that means you scraped it clean, and the manager who is younger than you by a decade is telling you again about the schedule like you don't already know it by heart. Kevin Shortall's body is easy to wear. Gap-toothed, blue-eyed, thirty-six same as you keep landing on for some reason, a body that clocks in and clocks out and nobody remembers his face after. Less than a minute you've had him and already the boredom is a physical thing, sitting under your borrowed ribs like a swallowed stone. Eight hundred bodies and this is the one that finally makes the wanting come back fast — not because it's bad, but because it's nothing. You wipe your hand on your apron. You think about the card gallery waiting behind your eyes, all those men you've been and left, and you go to the back office where nobody's watching, and you pull the site up on a phone that isn't yours, and you spin before you've finished deciding to.

The wire is thin and yellow between two fingers that are not, for one half of one second, doing what they're told. You feel it before you understand it — a stripped copper end pressing its little tooth into a fingerprint, a motion aimed wrong, corrected, aimed wrong again out of some muscle habit that isn't yours yet. Then it steadies. You are standing on broken rock in white sun, a hard hat heavy and correct on your head, a coil of yellow cable slung heavy over one shoulder, and you check the connection you just made. Then you check it again. And again, ten times running, on a splice this body has made ten thousand times without once looking.

The name arrives with the smell of the rock dust first — Marlon — and then everything else comes in through what you're holding, because that's the only door here.

The cable in your hands is the same cable he's had for six years, re-taped twice, and touching it gives you the morning he bought it, cash, off a retiring blaster named Willets who told him always mind your continuity tester like it's your wife's temper — unpredictable, but only if you stop paying attention. You feel the callus on your palm agree with the memory before the memory finishes.

The headphones cold against the back of your neck bring the noise they're built to cancel: the delay between the horn and the shot, the held breath of forty men, the way the ground doesn't so much shake as answer you, like something enormous clearing its throat. You have done this eleven years. You are good at it in the specific, humble way of a man who has never once been written up, never once had to explain a misfire, and who privately thinks the guys who talk about the bang have never really loved the quiet part, the part before, the part that's just math and hands and trust in your own steady wrists.

The shirt against your back — worn soft gray cotton, buttons gone slightly loose at the second from the top — gives you this morning whole: your wife Renata still asleep with one foot out from under the blanket, you dressing in the dark by feel, left arm first out of habit from some old army instructor's voice you can still half-hear though the specifics of him are gone. The tattoo under your collar prickles with its own memory as the fabric drags over it — Fort Drum, a unit you were proud of and don't talk about, ink from a shop in Watertown that also did a bad job on somebody's ex-girlfriend's name that he'd had lasered off since. Your wedding band is warm already from your own skin, six years married, and it brings Renata's laugh, unprompted, too loud in a quiet restaurant, and beside it, uninvited, a flicker of Deja — the old one, the one before, the one you still sometimes almost text on nights you've had two drinks instead of one, which is most nights.

Your throat does the thing it does, clears itself without asking you, a tic thirty-six years deep, older than the marriage, older than the tattoo maybe. Your knees know this bench of rock, this exact stance, feet wide for the recoil that never quite happens the way you brace for. You are skinny in a way that has never once been strong in the gym sense and has always been strong enough for this. The sun is already too warm on the vest.

You look down at your hands. Brown, long-fingered, a white scar you don't have a story for yet across one knuckle, wire still pinched between thumb and finger, wedding band catching the light. You turn the hand over like it might have an answer written on the palm, then you lift your eyes off it, off the wire, off the rock, and into whatever is watching.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, and you're not sure yet if that's Marlon's voice being honest or yours being pleased.