Otis Prather

Gerald Novotny's knees do not like the concrete floor of Station 44, and today they have told him so twice, once getting off the rig and once getting back on it. Sixty-two years in this body, a paramedic's whole life in the joints, and less than a minute ago you decided that a body that hurts this much when nothing has even happened yet is not a body you feel like keeping past your shift. That is the whole reason, and it is not a good one, and you do not examine it further. Gerald has silver hair going thin at the crown and blue eyes that have seen everything a stretcher can show a man, and you have been him long enough — less than a minute, but you have worn him for entire years before, worn hundreds like him — to know his knees are the kind of thing that makes a Friday afternoon feel like a good time to go looking for someone else's Friday evening. You sit in the break room, thumb the site open on Gerald's cracked phone screen, the wheel already spinning before the door swings shut behind you.

It lands, and the light of a phone that is not Gerald's is six inches from a face that is not Gerald's, and you are on your side in the dark with a man's whole weight settling around you like a coat someone else already broke in — heavier through the middle than Gerald, shorter, a low steady ache along the lower back where Gerald had none. The thumb under your thumb stutters once, mid-scroll, and then you make it move again, faster, past a photograph, past a headline, past something that had made this man's chest go tight seconds before you arrived and which you feel loosen now like a fist opening, because whatever was troubling him is not troubling you.

The room comes in through the skin first. The mattress is cheap, foam gone soft in the middle, and there's a stack of clothes at the headboard he never got around to putting away, and the smell is detergent and an old house and, faintly, the creek that must run near enough for the window to let it in. A hearing aid sits warm and small behind one ear, and when you shift your jaw a little the room's edges sharpen, a hum of insects outside resolving into individual insects. That is Otis, coming up through the pillow, through the mattress, through his own shoulder pressed into it: thirty-one years of Tuesday mornings smelling chalk dust and the vinegar some kid always brought for a science project, thirty-one Augusts of setting up a classroom nobody else believed still mattered, out past where the cable footbridge crosses the creek, green and shaded, the kind of green that gets in your clothes.

The ring finger tells you before the rest does — a paler stripe of skin, the phone shifting in your palm and grazing it, and it comes up whole: a woman named Carol who used to sit at the end of this same bed unclipping earrings, seventeen years married and eleven since it ended, no shouting in it by the finish, just two people who had quietly become a committee of one each. A daughter, grown, a voice on the phone twice a month that always starts a little careful, like she's checking the depth of water before she steps in it. You feel, distantly and then not distantly at all, how much Otis misses being needed by anyone in a room instead of on a screen.

The shirt is against your back, and it gives you this morning the way the site promised it would — sleeve by sleeve, in his hands, not yours: standing in front of the mirror before six, buttoning the chambray shirt he's had since Carol was still choosing his clothes, rolling each cuff twice because his forearms sweat by third period even with the window unit on. The lanyard going over his head last, the laminate card cool for one second against his sternum before it warmed. Coffee, black, because sugar upsets something now that didn't used to. The particular ritual of seating each hearing aid, a small precise motion his fingers do without asking his mind's permission anymore, the sound of the house arriving all at once like someone had turned a dial.

His body under you is sixty-three and honest about it — a low grinding stiffness in one shoulder from decades of chalk and dry-erase and pointing at boards, a strong flat back from bending down to a hundred desks a day for three decades, feet that know linoleum floors the way Gerald's knees knew concrete ones. He does not drink, hasn't in years, quit the way some men quit smoking — all at once and privately and never spoken of again. No nicotine ever. Faith sits in him quiet and unadvertised, a church three pews from the back, a hymn he still knows every word to and forgets he knows until it starts.

The empty classroom rises up on its own, unbidden, the way the site said it would: the smell of it after the last bell on a Friday, chairs still crooked, someone's forgotten water bottle sweating on a desk, the particular loneliness of a room built for thirty that currently holds one man erasing a board nobody's going to read again until Monday. He loves it and it has quietly worn him down for thirty-one years and he has never told anyone the second half of that sentence.

You feel the scar last, a thin numbness through one eyebrow when your fingers pass over it without meaning to, a car door, decades old, no story attached that surfaces, just old healed nerve going quiet under your touch.

You look at your hand — his hand — turning it slow in the low blue light, the tan line at the base of the ring finger catching what little glow the phone still throws before the screen dims to black on its own.

"Didn't feel a thing," you say, out loud, to the empty room, and you don't know yet if that's true, or how long you'll stay long enough to find out.