Owen Brandvold

The page has a wheel on it, and I have looked at it for most of an afternoon that was supposed to be about nothing. I have read the threads at two in the morning for as long as I can remember. I have watched the films where a man wakes up in another man's bed, another man's mirror, and keeps still so nobody will notice. I never believed any of it could be bought. I paid. The wheel turns, slows, and ticks over a name I don't read.

I am standing up. That is the first thing. A moment ago I was sitting, and now I am upright in a dark kitchen with my weight settled into the balls of my feet. There is a cold glass rectangle in my right hand, lit, and my thumb is on a price. It is more than a month of rent, and the number is not mine. The cabinets are dark wood. Under one of them a strip of light buzzes over a counter, and a dish rack holds one plate and one mug. The window is black.

My thumb lifts off the glass and stays lifted. The screen dims. I turn the phone face-down on the butcher block, and the knock of it is loud. My hand stays flat beside it.

His shirt is a soft blue henley, worn thin, and it lies against my back like a hand. Something comes up through it. Early this morning, before the light, there is a drawer, and his fingers pick this one over a gray one because the gray one smells of the closet. He pushes the sleeves to the elbow, then thinks better of it, because the school keeps its heating low. He does the top button and leaves the second. He is saving the other shirt for Monday. He feels a small, private pleasure at having decided something so easily.

The floor is cold through the soles. Underfoot is a garage-level floor, and with it comes the steep driveway and the bay window above, and the cold white light that falls into the room at dusk. He stands here most nights, in the glow of the counter lamp, with the faucet dripping. The memory is only a loneliness the size of a spoon. It isn't unhappy. It is a habit of being alone and fairly well.

My thumb finds the hem of the sleeve and a classroom opens. It is the front of an empty room after the last bell, chalk dust on his cuff, a stack of unmarked quizzes, a boy named Teo who stayed behind to ask whether a thing he'd written was stupid. It wasn't. He told him so, and the boy's whole face rose. This is the best thing he knows how to do, and he does it with his hands in his pockets so no one sees how much it matters. I hold the feeling and it is warm and slightly embarrassing.

Collar. Against my chest, under the cotton, something sits in the skin, and the memory behind it is blunt: heat, a long road, men whose names he has kept without writing them down. The ink is a unit insignia. He was twenty then. He doesn't talk about it at parties. When people ask, he says it's from a long time ago and lets the dimples do the work.

They are deep, I find. My cheeks have moved without being asked. I am almost smiling at nothing, and the dimples sit there even at rest, a face made friendly before he gets a say.

Then a woman, in the brown of a coat on a cold pier. An old girlfriend, whose laugh arrives before her face does. He still checks, once in a while, whether her name has lit his phone. It hasn't. There is a tightness under the ribs that comes with her, and I let it pass through, because it is his and not mine.

The body underneath all of this is long and strong. Six-one, the shoulders easy, the thighs warm from a day of standing. There is a dull ache low in the left knee, an old complaint. My breath goes in deep and comes out slow, a runner's breath. Saturday he would go out and drink with friends until the room tilted, and he would be glad about it, and then not for weeks. Here, in the kitchen, there's just an evening and a number he could not pay.

I lift my right hand, the one that set the phone down, and turn it over. The knuckles are scraped pale, the nails clean, a small ridge of chalk still in the crease of the thumb. I look up at the dark window. A man looks back at me, gray at the temples, blue-eyed, smooth along the jaw.

"Hello," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected, and mine.

Underneath it, quietly, is the only question I have. How long do I get? Is it years, or is it the time it takes the screen to wake, and the wanting come back?