Nathan Pruett

You are standing in Hassan Tarazi's kitchen in El Paso with his coffee going cold, and you can feel it, the thing that sent you back. It is small. His wife's reading glasses sit folded on the counter by the sugar bowl, and he, the man you are, the forty-four years of him, has been carrying them from room to room for forty minutes because he can't decide where they belong. That's all. You wear his mouth and his birthmark and his good shoulders, and you have been running the loop of his house like a man in a museum who has read every placard. Nothing in him is wrong. He is simply finished. Nothing in this house is yours to be sad about, and the glasses keep asking you to be.

So you open the page. The wheel turns under your thumb with its small dry ticking, and Hassan's hand, which is steady, which has signed ten thousand shipping forms, lets go of the cup.

Cold. That is the first thing: the air goes into you like a blade laid flat. Your feet are mid-air and then one of them isn't, and the stumble you were born into never lands, because the other foot is already there, already knows. Your arms drop low. Your head stays level. Your breath is a white cloth in front of your face, and your heart is a fist knocking steadily from the inside, four miles of it. At your wrist something buzzes against the bone, a split you never ran.

The path is packed dirt and gravel under the soles, and the canal is on your right, flat and pewter with the sky in it. Bare cottonwoods. A thin pink line over the roofs. The air is thin, and your lungs are used to it, which is the strangest gift so far.

Then the hoodie. The cuffs are worn soft at the thumbs, and the thumbs know it. Something opens.

A bathroom light, five a.m. A girl's voice from the bed, asleep, saying *take the black one, the gray one's got the hole.* He pulled the black over his head in the dark, and she was right, and he stood there liking being known. Her name is Dana. You feel her the way you'd feel a stair in the dark.

The left leg wants to bounce even while it runs; you can feel it wanting, a restlessness that lives under the muscle. It bounced in a church pew once, his mother's hand coming down flat on his knee. Catholic. The cold smell of a chapel, wax and radiators, and the shame of being nine and unable to be still.

The earbud is warm in his ear, and the music is something he's heard four hundred mornings. Under it, a flash from the pants, the drawstring knotted double: a small girl, four, standing on a kitchen chair and tying it for him, tongue between her teeth, *double, Daddy, so they don't fall.* The love in that is so big and so sudden that your stride falters again, and the body corrects it without you.

Then, from the watch, a worse thing. A phone number he never deleted. A woman on a bridge in some other year, rain in her hair, saying *I can't be the one who waits.* He has never told Dana. He runs this canal partly because it's the only place the number lets him alone. The ache has weight, and now it's yours too, borrowed, and it sits in the hollow behind the sternum where a man keeps what he's not worth enough to spend.

His calves are tight. His left knee has a low complaint. The warehouse lives in his lower back, a day of boxes stacked into trailers, and under his tongue a pouch of nicotine has gone flat and sweet. Less than five thousand dollars in the world, and yet the legs are strong, and the dawn is free.

You look down at your hands, the knuckles pale with cold, the calluses along the palms like a map of doors. You turn one over. The watch glows, mile four, a stranger's pace.

You lift your eyes to the water and say, to no one, in a voice that is deeper than you expected: "Okay. Okay, then, you."

The leg keeps bouncing in the stride. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back.