Neil Standish

You are standing in a New Orleans morning in a dead boy's uniform, or what feels like it. Rohan Mehta has been yours for less than a minute, and already you are tired of the gap in his teeth, which your tongue keeps finding. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. The deputy's radio is still talking at his hip, a woman reading out a plate number, and under it you can feel what you came to the wheel for last time and did not get: he is twenty-four and he is certain of everything. You wanted to be a man who had already lost something and kept working anyway. The wheel gave you certainty instead. So you pay again, and the page turns its slow wheel, and you let go of the goatee and the brown eyes and the black hair.

Then you are crouched.

The knees come first, thirty-seven years of them, bent deep and a little angry about it. Your right hand is in the open dryer, and the heat reaches your wrist. A single sock hangs from your fingers, grey wool, a navy toe. The fluorescent tube overhead hums at a pitch you feel in your back teeth. The air smells of detergent and cold concrete. Nobody has spoken, and the only moment that has passed is this one.

You pull the load out in one warm armful and drop it in the basket. Your hands know the next part before you do. They shake out a shirt, snap it once, and fold it with the corners squared as if a ruler were laid along them. Three seconds, flat, set on the stack. Somewhere upstairs there are eight crumpled shirts in a drawer, and these hands never once folded those.

The grey T-shirt against your back is soft from a thousand washes. It gives you a morning: his thumbs on the buttons of a flannel, the plaid now knotted at your waist, one sleeve at a time over the shirt. He did it in the dark, because the turbine crew meets early and the wind is better before the heat. His thumbnail is bitten to the quick. You feel the sting of it when you press the fabric, and then you feel his habit, the teeth going to the corner of the nail without a thought.

The sock in your fingers is warm, and it gives you a woman's laugh in a kitchen with the window open, and a loud, stupid argument about a mortgage. She said, you never finish things. He said nothing. The silence he kept that day is still in his jaw, and it is why the beard is kept so close.

The concrete is cold through the wool under your feet. A crack runs beneath you, and he has been meaning to fill it for two years. The old floor gives you the Phoenix yard, gravel and a saguaro against white sky, and the long climb inside a tower with the hatch open over his head. He loves that more than anything. The whole sky is up there, and nothing in it wants anything from him.

Your shoulders ache pleasantly. The scalp under the buzz is cool. A mole sits high on his cheek, and you feel it when you smile.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Calloused, bitten, steady. You raise your eyes to the dim little window and say, quietly, "Okay. Show me what you did with it."

The tube hums over you. You do not know whether you have an hour of him or a lifetime, and the wanting has not come back yet. You listen for it anyway.