Matthew Dorsey

You are in Dylan Fenwick, and Dylan Fenwick is tired of being managed by himself. Twelve minutes. You sat in his kitchen with the laptop open and the fridge humming, and you told yourself it was only the stubble that annoyed you, the soft give of his stomach against the table edge. That was not it. You had put his phone face-down so you wouldn't see the three messages from his mother, which you had already read, and which had sounded to you like somebody being fond of a person who was not there. That is the answer. You will not say it. You paid, you spun, and the wheel did what it does.

Wet asphalt, cold air, a kerb that isn't where the foot expects it. You are mid-stride and the stride is a drunk's, loose at the knee, one shoe dragging on every third step. The kerb drops away. Your hand slaps the roof of a parked car and the metal is cold and beaded with rain, and the drag in the foot is gone because you have simply stopped doing it. The street shines. The shutters are down on every shop. It is the hour when even the traffic lights seem to be changing for nobody.

Beer sits in the body like warm sand. Your head is clear and the legs are not, and you set them down carefully, one, two, forty steps, even and quiet. He is heavy in the shoulders and thick through the thighs, a body that lifts things on purpose. Thirty-eight years in it, and the lower back says so.

The jacket first. The canvas cuffs are stiff and the collar rubs the beard, and you push your hand into the pocket and find a folded receipt, and it opens in you like a door. A hallway, a dark one. A small girl on the stairs in a nightgown, whispering that she heard a noise, and his whole chest going soft with the lie he tells her: *It's just the house, Bean. Houses talk.* He carries her up against this same shoulder. She smells of detergent and sleep. There are two more doors down the hall, and he looks in on each, counting, as he does every night, the way other men say grace.

The ring. It turns on the finger when you close the hand, a plain band worn thin at the bottom, and a woman comes up through it: kitchen light, her hair twisted up in a clip, her back to him at the sink. She says *you're allowed one night, just come home*, and he was not angry, he was grateful, and ashamed of being grateful. Tonight was the one night. He drank to forget a thing about his job, a layoff list, a name on it that was not his and was worse. His thumb rubs the ring and the shame comes with it.

The tattoo under the sleeve itches, the unit insignia, and the cloth over it hauls up a heat of sand and a diesel stink, a boy's voice on a radio, and a loyalty so total it is nearly a religion. He had come back and sat in a pew and let a different loyalty have him, and he did not know which one he trusted more. The scar in the eyebrow tingles in the cold. A cabinet corner, age nine, his brother laughing and then not.

Left foot, right foot. The shoes are lace-ups he tied at six this evening, double-knotted, because she teased him about the single. The hoodie under the jacket holds the morning's dressing: arm, arm, the zip pulled up to the sternum, the small hurry of a man who has a standing desk and two monitors waiting and a cold coffee he will drink anyway.

At the corner the sign says the way home is right. Your body turns left. Under the streetlight you lift your hand, turn it over, the knuckles scraped from the car, the band catching yellow light. You raise your eyes to the empty street.

"Well. Hello, Matthew."

The wanting is already somewhere behind your ribs, quiet. You do not know how long he holds.