Neil Everett Lindqvist

You are standing at a sink in Johannesburg, in the afternoon, running the cold tap over Yusuf Moosa's wrists, and the thing you cannot get past is that his knees ache when it is about to rain. Twenty hours and eighteen minutes. You have been told, by the stairs and by the small of his back, that sixty-five is a long way down a ladder. This morning you reached for a high shelf in his workshop and the reach did not arrive. A coil of wire sat there, a hand's breadth beyond the little man you were wearing, and you stood with your arm up like someone asking a question no one would answer. You are not sad. You are bored of being short of things. You dry his hands on his trousers and open the page with the wheel on it. It turns. It is not ceremony. It is a click.

Cold air, and you are already moving.

Your left foot is coming down and there is no ground where Yusuf's body expected it. A stumble starts and never lands. Your right foot takes the weight instead, and the whole frame is long, dense, easy in the hip. Breath goes out of you as a white cloud and you run through it. Something buzzes on your wrist. A wire runs from both ears into a silence between songs. A canal lies to the left, black and flat, with lamps lit in it.

Then the body starts to hand you things, through whatever it touches.

The jacket first, zipped to the throat and damp across the chest. It gives you a morning an hour ago: his thumbs working the zip in the dark, a woman asleep and warm in the bed behind him, her ankle out from the blanket. The love is plain and unhurried, and it is his, not yours. The watch strap on your wrist gives you a number he is proud of, and a promise to himself about mile four, made at the kitchen counter with a glass of water. Water is all he drinks now. There is an old craving under that fact, like a tooth that remembers.

Your hand goes up to your face. You did not tell it to. It rubs the short beard along the jaw, and the fingertips find the nose, set slightly crooked. The knuckles remember a fist and a floor, a night in his twenties, a man whose name he has made himself forget. A second flash: smoke, the cigarettes he gave up, the exact shape of the last one stubbed out on a forge step.

The shoes slap the concrete, and the ground tells you the rest. Under the running there is an anvil. It rings in his shoulders, the hammer's weight a ghost across the palm, the hot-iron smell of the coal in the back of his throat. He knows how to make a straight thing from a bent one. He knows when to stop. Under the sleeve, on the inner forearm, the geometric lines sit cool against the cold. He drew them himself, on paper, over a winter, and never told anyone what they meant. Another woman, from years back, once traced them with a finger, and he still has not forgiven himself for something that happened afterward. Some money sits in an account, enough that he is not afraid. He does not pray. He stands outside before the fire is lit and listens to the day arrive, and calls that enough.

His lungs are good. His thighs burn clean. Four miles of him are in your legs.

You slow, and you look down. Your hand opens in front of you, broad, scarred across the pads, and you turn it over. You lift your eyes.

"Well," you say, in his low voice, "you're bigger than the last one."

The watch buzzes again. Somewhere a new wanting is already waiting, patient as a coal, and you do not know whether it comes in years or in four minutes.