Neil Brandvold

The hands on the wheel are Dennis Whitaker's, and they are tired of being his. Broad palms, soot worked into the creases that no soap reaches, a chimney sweep's forearms. It is early in Houston, the day not started, and you stand at a kitchen counter in his house with his coffee going cold, his knees complaining about forty years of ladders. He is a good body. He works. That is the trouble. Every flue he has climbed lives in his shoulders, and you have spent your whole minute inside him knowing there is nothing in him you haven't already been. You did not want a man who could do things. You wanted a man who had something to lose, and you wanted it in the same second you thought of it. His thumb is already on the trackpad. The wheel turns. Dennis goes out of you like a held breath.

Dark. Weight. Your cheek is pressed into cotton that smells of somebody's hair and dry desert air. The breath in your chest is ragged, then you smooth it, one pull, and it goes even. Your arm hangs off the mattress and you draw it up, roll onto your back, fold your hands on your chest. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your ribs.

The shirt first. A gray henley, thin at the cuffs. Against your back it gives you a morning, his, not yours: the third button he never fastens, fingers pushing the sleeves to the elbow because the classroom radiators in January were always too hot, the sound of thirty chairs scraping. Then the trousers, olive and soft with washing, still on him because he fell asleep in them after a night he is still carrying. A teacher who works nights, then. The oddity is real: a man who sleeps while the sky is still dark, and a school that runs on a schedule you cannot read from here. The memory won't say. It only says tired, a particular dry-throated tired.

Your hand drifts up to your face without being sent. Fingertips on the beard, short and trimmed close, then the bridge of the nose, and there it is, the bump, the slight lean. The touch opens a gravel yard, white afternoon, a boy's elbow, a flash of white pain and a friend laughing with his hand over his mouth, fourteen years old and bleeding onto his shirt. A doctor setting it crooked. He never minded. He touches it when he is thinking, and you have just learned he is always thinking.

The sheet under your palm is cool. Three children's drawings are taped somewhere in this house; you know it the way you know a word on the tip of the tongue. A girlfriend sleeping, or not sleeping, in another room, her name arriving as a warmth behind the sternum. And an older ache, an old girlfriend, a letter he never answered, kept like a pebble in a shoe. The mattress holds you at five-foot-three of compact, wiry, unhurried body. Your calves are tight. Your jaw aches where he clenches in sleep. Your knuckles know chalk.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Smaller than Dennis's. Clean. No soot anywhere.

You look up at the dark ceiling and say, softly, "Hello, Neil."

Nobody answers. Somewhere in the house a child coughs. You wonder how long a quiet like this lasts, and whether the wanting is already stirring under the ribs.