Martin Szymanski

Ruben's knees have been telling you since the stairs. You are standing at the end of a corridor in a school in Denver with a mop bucket, mid-morning, and the floor shines like it always does, and nobody has said your name in two hours. Fifty-eight years of someone else's back. He was a good one. He knew where the keys went. But the building is quiet, the wheel is in your pocket the way a tongue is in a mouth, and you set the mop against the cinderblock and thumb the page open. There is a thing you could not do in him: the girl at the office door asked you something in Spanish, and Ruben's mouth knew it and you did not, and you stood there with his answer sitting behind his teeth like a coin you couldn't reach. You pay. You spin.

The hum comes first, a thick steady drone under yellow foam in your ears, and your right hand is already on a cold knob and your left is already reaching, and then there is a half second where the hand does the wrong thing. It turns the wrong way. You feel it go. You do it again, slowly, correctly, and the plastic keeps spooling from the die in a long clear ribbon, onto the reel, humming, indifferent.

Your weight is on the balls of your feet. The rubber mat is spongy under his boots. Your heart goes hard and steady, an athlete's heart gone a little stale. Through the tall window the brick houses stand under a low gray sky, and the lamp above hums warm on the side of your face.

You check the next one. And the next. Ten times your hands check a thing that has not needed checking in years, and you do not know why they do it, only that they do.

The shirt cuff is rolled twice, and when you press the fold the morning arrives: his thumbs working the buttons in a dark kitchen, a woman's voice from the stairs saying he'd forgotten the lunch again, and the smell of the coffee he didn't have time to drink. The glove in your back pocket is stiff as bark, and your fingers close on it and there is a different year. A forklift, a shout, the crack of his own face against a steel rail, and the cold burn of a nose set crooked by a friend in a parking lot, both of them laughing, bleeding, drunk by noon. He is a heavy drinker. You feel it as a patient ache behind the eyes and a dry want in the throat, a thing he rations by the clock.

Your thumb finds your mouth before you tell it to. The nail is already short, bitten to the quick, and the taste of it is his, salt and old metal. Through that taste comes a girl at a bus stop, years before the wife, with rain in her hair. He still thinks of her sometimes, and you feel the tenderness and the small guilt. The ring is warm on your left hand, and under it comes the daughter on his shoulders at a county fair, her heels drumming his collarbones, and a joy so plain it hurts in the chest. Black ink coils up the right forearm, and as you flex it you feel the needle, the old fear, the sense of being marked by something larger than himself. He does not pray. He stands in his driveway some mornings and feels the sky listening, and calls that enough. The savings are a number he checks the way he checks the line: quietly, and a little afraid.

His shoulders ache. His forearms are strong. You are a stranger to every part of him.

You lift both hands off the machine and look at them. The knuckles, the bitten nails, the ring. You turn them over. Then you look up into the glass, and a crooked-nosed man looks back at you.

"Hello, Martin," you say.

Somewhere there is a wheel, and a quiet place in you already asking how long.