Owen Brandt

You are standing at a machine in Ohio, in a body that is twenty-eight and five foot four, and the reason you are leaving it is a small one. The key to the locker. He, the one you are wearing, kept a key on a loop of green cord, and this morning you stood in the cold of the plant lot before the shift whistle and felt the cord against your neck and knew nothing about why it was green. Not a flash. Nothing. A man's whole life under a cord and it would not open for you. You have been wearing him for less than a minute and already the quiet in him is the loudest thing about him. You don't want a quiet one. You want the one that talks when you touch it. You press the wheel.

The bench is there before the lot is gone. Bright light, flat and white, and your weight comes down into the heels of a tall man, six feet, and the floor under you is old tile, cool through the soles of his shoes. Your hands are in gloves, blue, and one of them is closing on a rack of tubes. The motion is already moving. You do it wrong. The rack tips against your fingers, a half second, a stumble in a thing his hands have done ten thousand times. You stop. You do it again, slowly, correctly, and the tubes seat with a small plastic click. Then ten more, each one checked, because you do not trust a body that is not yet yours.

The first thing to give is the coat. Cotton, washed so many times it has gone soft as a cloth, heavy at the left pocket where a pen sits. You shift your shoulders and the sleeve drags at the wrist and a morning comes up through it: a rowhouse hall, a bulb that needs changing, his wife's voice from the kitchen asking if he has eaten, and him saying he will on the way. He pulls the dark shirt over his head, then the coat from the hook by the door, left arm first, always the left, a habit older than the marriage. The collar of the shirt is rough where he shaves it close. He is tired in a way that is almost pleasant. He has been up since before the light, and the light is only beginning now at the window, red brick and a pale street.

Your left hand knows the ring. Under the glove, a plain band, and the glove presses it against the bone, and he comes: the day of it, a cold hall, a hired suit that did not fit at the shoulders, her laughing at the way he held the paper. He did not drink at the party. He had stopped drinking years before, quietly, in the way a man lets a room go dark. Her family thought it was faith and it was, and it was also the other thing. He prayed the dawn prayer on a folded towel before he left, you can feel the knees remember it, a faint ache at the left one, the long thigh muscles loose from kneeling. His back is good. His breath is slow. The centrifuge hums beside you with a note he can hear without listening.

Then the steps through the window, the white marble worn hollow, and the sun just reaching the top of them. He loved that, the first sun down the block. He used to stand at the door with his keys and wait for it. The keys are in the right pocket. You do not touch them. You are afraid to take all of it at once.

You pull the glove from your right hand and look. Long fingers, light hair across the knuckles, a thumb that bends back easily. You turn it over. Nothing on it that is yours, nothing on it that is anyone's but his. Then you look up, past the rack and the window, at no one.

"Okay," you say. "Show me the rest."

The centrifuge winds down. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be his when the light reaches the bench.