Neil Chaudhary

You are standing in a dark kitchen in Western Kansas, in a roofer's body, with the refrigerator humming and a glass of water going warm in your hand. Everyone in the house is asleep. Tyler Brandt's knees ache the way they do after a day on a pitched roof, a dull hot ache under the kneecap. His shoulders are wide and heavy and good, and you have used them all night to carry nothing. The body works. That is not the trouble.

The trouble is that you stood at the sink an hour ago and tried to be sorry for him, and found nothing in your chest to be sorry with. You have been Tyler for less than a minute of your own counting, and already he is a coat that fits and says nothing. You put the glass down and open the laptop. The wheel is waiting, patient as a plate. You pay, and you spin.

Heat. Then salt, diesel, and cold steel under your palm.

You are standing bent, one arm out, one hand closed around a chain link. The hangar deck is huge and gold with late light coming in sideways through the open bay. A jet sits chained down at your left shoulder. Your arm has just done something wrong, a half-second slip in a motion it has made ten thousand times, and you feel it correct itself. Do it again, slowly. The hook seats. You check it. The next one, you check. The next.

You are small. That is the first thing: 5'6", low to the deck, the weight of you soft around the middle and not yet hard, nineteen years old in the knees, which feel like nothing at all. Your breath goes in easily. Nothing hurts. After Tyler it feels like being handed a glass of water.

The chain is cold and gritty, and the grit opens something. A mess table, his own voice saying no thanks, just water, and the other sailors' easy shrug. He has said it so many times that it has gone smooth. Nobody asks anymore. He is the one who doesn't drink and doesn't smoke, and he is never lonely about it, only careful.

The coverall is stiff at the collar and soft at the elbows. The sleeves hold the morning: standing in a narrow bunk-room, one arm and then the other, zipping up the front slowly, the metal teeth cool against his chin. He checked his jaw in the steel mirror and ran a thumb over the shaved skin, then combed the pompadour up and back with water and a little wax, tall above the forehead, because that was the one part of the day that was entirely his. A cap pulled on over it with great care, so as not to crush it. A small flashlight clipped in the chest pocket. Under it, in the other pocket, a folded square of paper.

You do not open it. The fabric alone gives you a boyfriend's laugh in a Seoul alley, steam rising off a street cart, neon sliding across wet pavement, a hand finding his sleeve and staying. Then a different ache, older and quieter: a girl he loved and left, or who left, and the polite messages still going back and forth with her. He is afraid of what his congregation would say. He is afraid of his mother's face. He sits through the meetings with his hands folded and keeps this room of his life locked, a good boy with a key.

His debt sits under all of it like the hull under the deck. Money he owes. Money he sends. A number he repeats in his head at night, and the ship rocking beneath it.

Boots pinch at the little toe. The skin of his palms is rough along the base of the fingers, calluses laid by chain and rope. A mole high on one cheek itches in the warm air and you do not scratch it.

You straighten, and your spine clicks once. You lift your hand from the chain and turn it over. It is brown, narrow, and not yours, the nails clean and bitten short. You look up.

"All right," you say, quietly, to nobody. "Let's see how long you last."

The deck hums beneath your boots. Somewhere a bell rings, and you wait to feel the wanting come back.