Neil Brannigan

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Las Vegas, in a body that is six minutes old, and it is already too short. Garrett Nishimura's arms stop where you expect them to keep going. The phone is lit in his hand, the wheel on the screen, and the bus depot lanyard hangs from a hook by the door like a thing that belongs to someone more patient. He drove the Strip loop for eleven years. His knees know every pothole. You do not want the knees. You do not want the steady, small, kind life of him. It was fine, and it was finished by the third minute. You press your thumb down, and the apartment goes out like a held breath.

Heat, and a hum of lamp. The tape is already between your fingers, a strip pinched flat across a stranger's ankle, and your weight is down on one knee on a stool that is too low. Night air, stucco, dry palm rustling somewhere above. Nobody has noticed. The strip goes on crooked, wrong, and your hands, his hands, pull it, and lay it again, slow, correct. Then ten more, each one checked, smoothed, pressed with a thumb, for a job that has not needed checking in years.

The polo is damp at the shoulder blades, and the cotton drags when you breathe. It gives you a morning: a hand pulling it off a hook, thinking *clean one*, sleeve over the left arm first, always the left, a habit from a locker room at nineteen. The khakis come with a belt notch worn pale, a mother's voice on a phone saying *eat something before you go*, and his own laugh, short, through the nose. The belt pouch bumps your hip. Scissors, tape, the cold sweat of two bottles. Touch the scissors and it floods: a boy's knee, a gym floor, his first real tear, how he stood there with no idea what to do and swore he would never feel that useless again. That is why the hands know everything. The hands are a promise.

The beard is thick against your collar. The lip ring clicks against your teeth when you swallow, a small cold stubbornness he chose at twenty-six and never explained. Freckles prickle in the lamp heat. Your knuckles itch to crack, and when they do, the pop runs up the forearm like relief, and you feel how often he does it, when he is nervous, when he is proud. A Sunday comes up from the rosary-smooth edge of a cuff: a church, a pew, a mother's shoulder, the Catholic quiet he keeps like a coat in the closet. Six-one, strong in the thighs, a dull ache at the base of the spine from kneeling all night. A beer, once or twice a month, loud and warm. No one waiting at home. He has made peace with the quiet, and you can taste the peace, and it is not yours.

The athlete on the table says, "You good?"

You lift his hands into the lamp. Freckled to the wrist, the knuckles red from cracking, tape's glue on the fingertips. You turn them over. Then you look up.

"Yeah," you say, in his voice, lower than you expected. "Just got here."

And somewhere under the ribs the question is already stirring: how long, before the wanting returns, and whether you are still him tomorrow.