Martin Healy

You are standing in Frank Morrison's kitchen in Phoenix, and the linoleum is cool under his bare feet. His knees ache a little from the line. Somewhere in the house a swamp cooler ticks. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what he can't do. He can't stay. Not because anything is wrong with him. He is five-four, and every shelf in his kitchen is a shelf you have to reach for. You wanted to be looked at from below for once, to be the tall one in a doorway. That is the whole reason, and you will not say it aloud. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then it is a bed, and you are face-down in it.

Your cheek is pressed to a pillow gone warm and damp. Your right arm hangs off the mattress, and the blood has drained out of the hand until it feels like a glove full of sand. Your breath is ragged and then, all at once, it is even. You do the thing his body has never done. You draw the arm up, roll onto your back, and fold your hands on your chest like a man laid out. Light comes through a gap in the curtains, amber from the street, and the L rattles somewhere close. You are long. Your feet find the end of the bed and your shins go on past where Frank's would have stopped.

The sheet is under your fingertips, cotton worn soft, and it opens something.

A wedding. It is not yours. St. Something's, wool in June, a girl in white looking up at him, and he is so afraid of dropping the ring that he cracks his knuckles in the vestibule and she laughs at him. The joy of it is his, warm all the way down. Then the same hands, years later, working the band off in a lawyer's parking lot. The finger is pale there still. You rub the bare place with your thumb and feel a grief that has no sharp edges left, only weight.

The gray long-sleeved shirt you are wearing is thin at the cuffs. Your fingers tug the cuff, and you get a Sunday: two kids in the back seat of a car, a daughter reading the cereal box aloud, a son kicking the seat. He is a finance director, and he spent that whole morning building a spreadsheet in his head and wishing he were present instead. He is ashamed of it. It is his shame, not yours, and it sits in your chest like a swallowed stone.

You turn your head on the pillow. Your hair falls across your forehead, and you push it aside with the back of a knuckle. Your thumb finds the scar through the eyebrow, and a flash comes up: a hockey stick, a cousin's yard, an afternoon in snow, blood warm on his cold face and his mother's voice. He was nine. He was delighted.

The knuckles crack, left then right, before you have told them to. Your jaw is smooth. You smell old wool and radiator dust. Your back is wide against a mattress that has held him alone for years, and every part of you hurts a little in the ordinary way of fifty-four.

You lift your hands into the amber light. They are long-fingered, with a pale stripe at the base of the ring finger. You turn them over. Then you look up, into the dark, at whoever is there.

"Tall," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected. It is a stranger's voice, and it fits you. Somewhere in the walls the L goes by, and you wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting comes back.