Martin Joseph Kowalski

Here is the thing you can't say to anyone: Silas Hightower's body was good, and it wasn't enough.

You are standing in his kitchen in Atlanta, barefoot on cold tile, three minutes into a man who can do a split from standing. You tried it ten minutes ago in the dark of the living room, the whole floor of his apartment a stage, and your hips opened like a door. The refrigerator hums. His phone lights on the counter with a message from someone named Teo, *you up?*, and you do not know who Teo is, and the shirt you are wearing does not tell you. It is a new body. It has not yet learned you. It could, and that is the trouble. You already know that it will, and then it will be a room you live in, and you will want the next door.

So you open the page. The wheel is a dull gold, turning. You pay with his thumb, his card. Cleft chin, brown eyes, thirty-three years of grace, and you leave it standing in a kitchen at night with the refrigerator humming.

Spin.

Streetlight through a gap in the curtains, and your face is in a pillow. Your breath goes from ragged to even in one pull. The arm hanging off the mattress draws itself up, the body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold on your chest, a posture this man has never once slept in.

Then the sheets. Gray cotton, rough from washing, twisted around one shin. The memory comes up through your skin and it is his: a Sunday in this bed, years ago, a girl's hair across this same pillow, her laugh, the smell of her shampoo, and then a long stretch of the bed being only his, the cold half. The pillowcase gives you something else: a small boy asleep on it once, drooling, during a thunderstorm, and the man's whole chest going tight with a fear that was also joy. One child. He sees him every other weekend and counts the days in between.

The black T-shirt. It is soft with age, and as it lies against your back you feel him pulling it over his head in a dark apartment, tired, a Tuesday like this one, thinking about a signal that would not settle on a bench. Oscilloscope green. A clamp holding a board. His fingers know the tiny tool; the knowledge sits in the tips like a held note. He solders without thinking. He is good, and he is proud of it in a way he would never say aloud.

Your jaw is clenched. You find it clenched and release it, and it tightens again by itself. That is him. Even asleep he is braced against something.

The body: it is short, and it feels it, close to the ground. A softness at the belly, a thinness at the shoulders, forty-five years of sitting. The knees ache a little, dully, like a bill. The scalp is smooth against the pillow; the stubble on your jaw rasps against your own knuckle. There is a bad tattoo on the inside of one forearm, and as you think of it the memory comes, hot with embarrassment: a night with friends, a needle, a stupid word he has hidden under sleeves ever since. Under it all is a calm, an old quiet. Prayer. Incense, a low chanted voice, candle smoke at a service he attends and does not discuss. It lies in him like a stone in a stream.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over, the knuckles blunt, the pads of the fingers a little burned. Small, capable hands. Not yours. Yours now.

You look up, into the dark, and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

How long, though. The wanting is already a small thing under the breastbone, asleep like him, and you do not know when it wakes.