Neil Garrett Pruitt

You are standing in Liam Doyle's kitchen in Detroit, and you have been Liam for less than a minute. The knife roll is still on the counter. His beard itches. He is twenty-three and the scar through his eyebrow pulls when you frown, and you are frowning, because he is a prep cook and the onions are not the problem. The problem is that you already know what this body can do. It can dice a case of onions without crying, and it will tell you nothing you want. It is Tuesday morning and the light is flat on the stove. You have the phone in your hand before you have decided anything. That is how you know.

The wheel turns, and the kitchen is gone.

Cold, sweet smell of latex. A brush in your right hand, wet, loaded, an inch from a white doorframe, and your arm is already moving. It moves wrong. Half a second of wrongness, a stroke that wanders off the line, and then you take control and drag it back slowly, correctly, and the line comes out clean. You do the next one carefully. And the next. Ten of them, each one checked. Your eyes go to the edge of the tape every time, the way no one's eyes have in years.

Your jaw is working. A toothpick, flat and soft from chewing, rolls from one corner of your mouth to the other.

Then the coverall gives you the morning. Canvas, stiff at the knees, soft at the elbows. He stepped into the legs standing on one foot, then the other, in a dark bedroom, trying not to wake her. Zip to the sternum. He rolled the sleeves twice and they never stay. She turned over and said his name into the pillow, and he said *go back to sleep*, and she did not, and he stood there a second longer than he needed to. He was happy. The happiness is his, not yours, and it sits in your chest like a swallowed stone.

The ring on your left hand is thin and warm. When your thumb turns it, you get a hardware store parking lot, a cheap box, his stomach cramping, her laughing before he finished asking. Under the paint on your fingers is the tight skin of a man who washes his hands too much.

The tattoo you do not see until you shift the brush. Inner forearm, small, lopsided, a ghost with one eye too big. Your skin tightens against the memory of a friend's kitchen, a borrowed needle, nineteen and drunk, everyone howling. He has hated it for nine years. He wears long sleeves in church-free Ohio and rolls them to the elbow anyway. The shame is a small old coin you could turn over forever.

The window is bright. Out there is a main street with one stoplight, red, and a diner with its windows papered over. He ate eggs there every Saturday until it closed. You know the stool.

Your body is twenty-eight and soft in the middle, slim in the shoulders, a back that aches low from the crouching. Your hair is stiff with dye, faded blue, and you remember doing it at the bathroom sink on a dare from himself, a small stupid rebellion. Freckles you cannot see burn faintly in the sun. In your cheek, under the lip, a nicotine pouch, a slow tingle. You quit drinking two years ago. Your hands do not shake. They are very sure.

A voice surfaces, through the shirt-and-fence memory of his own yard: the neighbor, tall, dark-haired, a cleft chin, hosing his driveway. Dale. You were Dale. Eight weeks ago you would have said that was nothing. You know how Dale holds a tray, how he leaves his porch light on. Neil has waved at that man across a fence a thousand times and thought him pleasant. You wore the pleasant man and left him less than a minute ago, and now his neighbor stands inside your hands.

You set the brush across the can. You hold up your right hand and turn it over, white at the knuckles, ring, paint in the creases. A stranger's hand, entirely yours.

You lift your eyes, and you say, to nobody, to the lens of the day, "Well. Let's see how long you last."