Michael Dunleavy

You are standing in a shop in Chicago, in the middle of a Tuesday morning, in a body that is eighteen and has never once been tired. Your hands are black to the wrist with someone else's trade. The impact wrench shudders in them, and you set it down so you can hear yourself think. You have been this boy for one minute. He is strong and quick, and he is good at the thing in front of him. None of that is what sent you back.

It was the lug nut. You reached for the next one and the boy's hands already knew it, and they were happy, and you felt nothing. You could not make it yours. He loves this work, and you stand inside his love like a coat that fits and has no pockets. You want to be someone who has already finished something. You want to be heavy with years. So you wipe your palm on the rag, take out the phone, open the page, and press the wheel.

It lands on a man asleep.

Breath goes ragged, then even, in one pull. You are face-down in sheets that have lost their corners, the pillow damp against your cheek. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has left it. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your shoulder like a belt. You draw the arm up. The body rolls onto its back, heavy and slow, and your hands fold at your chest. You somehow know he has never slept like this. He is always on his face.

The shirt comes first. The cotton is soft from a thousand washes, and it rides up over your belly. It gives you a drawer, a stuck runner, and his thumb working it loose. Then a quiet apartment and a man getting dressed without hurry. He pulled on a navy polo and a jacket with elastic cuffs because mornings in the courtyard stay cool until the sun clears the roofline. He had nowhere to be. He had been nowhere to be for two years, and it still felt like a held breath.

The sheet is under your calf, and then the tattoo wakes. Black and gray, a face, a man's face, on the muscle below the knee. A flash of needle, a chair in a shop that smelled of green soap, and a grief he chose to wear where he could look down and see it. You do not get the name. You get his looking down, a hundred mornings, with his coffee going cold on the porch rail.

Your knees ache with a dull weather. Your belly rises and falls, a warm weight. Your back is stiff along the left side where the mattress has pressed it. The beard is rough against the pillow, and when you swallow, your mouth has the clean flatness of a man who stopped drinking and misses it only in the evenings. There is money behind him, a lot of it, quiet and unspent. There is a long loneliness that he mostly liked. He believed in something he could not name and did not talk about it.

The curtain light slides to your face. You lift your hands in front of you. They are broad, freckled, soft at the knuckle, and strangers. You turn them over. Then you look up into the dark.

"Well," you say, and the voice comes low and gravelly, from a chest you have not learned. "Hello, Michael."

The room says nothing. Somewhere a bus kneels at a stop. You wonder how long this one holds, and when the wanting will come back, and whether tomorrow you will still be lying in his sheets.