Omar Whitfield

You are standing at a bench with a torch in your hand and a hood flipped up, and the heat is already on your face when you decide. Thomas Keegan has been yours for less than a minute. His sixty-five years sit in your knees. The belly shifts when you breathe. The freckled forearms are blistered where a spark found the gap in the glove, and the whole of him smells of flux and cold coffee. He is a good body. It works. The weld you were laying was clean.

But you looked at the bead and felt nothing, and you knew the feeling. It is the same one every time. You took your thumb off the trigger and said you were going to the bathroom. In the stall you opened the page with the wheel on it. Nobody knows what you do in there, and you pay.

The wheel turns.

The road is dark, and then it is a different dark. Your hands are at ten and two, and the dash glow is on your knuckles. The car has drifted a foot toward the line. You pull it straight in one smooth motion, and your hands come off the wheel, settle lower and wider, and the signal clicks on. It is for an exit that is not his. You do not know yet whether it is yours.

The car is small and tight, and the seat is set for a man exactly this tall. There is a lightness in the chest. Thirty is a body that does not announce itself. The knees do not ache. The back is straight without being asked. Your fingers are already moving on the wheel, tapping, shifting, resettling. They cannot stand still.

The sleeve comes first. Dark cotton at the wrist, and you rub it with your thumb. The morning opens. A bathroom light, a razor drawn slowly along the jaw, again and again until it is smooth, because he likes the feeling of clean skin before a long day. The button at the collar, the cuff rolled twice. The tie he knots without looking, his fingers quick. Somewhere a child shouts for a shoe. It is a house full of noise, and he loves it and is tired. A woman's voice says his name from the next room, and she is laughing.

The wheel is warm. Under your palm there is grain, and the grain gives you an evening of six monitors going blue as numbers turn red, and a plain quiet pride in having called it right. Then a prayer rug unrolled in a small office at midday, his forehead low, his mind finally still. He has never touched a drink, and he has never wanted one. That calm is in his chest like a coin.

The watch on your wrist is cool. You turn it, and a child's hand is in your hand, three of them in a row crossing a lot. You are being pulled in three directions and you are happy.

The tongue finds a hard edge behind the lip. Gold. It is a canine, and it is his one vanity, a small bright thing he grins with.

Three miles from home, the signal is still ticking. You look at your hands, turn them over, and watch the light slide across the palms. Then you look up into the dark glass.

"Hello," you say, and the gold flashes. "Let's see how long you last."

The exit slides closer. Your fingers will not stop moving.