Owen Pelkey

You are standing in Eliot Maguire's kitchen in the dark, and the refrigerator hums, and you have the phone in his hand with the wheel already on it. Four days. His knees complain on the linoleum, his stomach presses the counter's edge, and his beard is damp where you chewed it without noticing. You are bored of the stairs. That is the part you'd say aloud. The part you wouldn't is the voicemail from his sister, played twice, that you could not answer in any voice that was his. A body works. It does not know what to say to her. You press the screen with his thumb.

The room turns over. Cold air, a streetlight through a gap in the curtains, and the weight of a mattress under your whole front. You are face-down. One arm hangs off the bed and the blood has gone out of it. Your breath is ragged, then it evens, and you draw the arm up, roll onto your back, and fold your hands on your chest. It is a posture of the dead, and it is yours.

Then the sheets begin. Cotton gone soft, a washed-out smell of cedar and salt, and a flash that is not yours: a hatch open to a white sky, wind taking his breath, the whole turbine ticking as it cools. He loves this. He loves being the highest thing for miles, the gulls below him. The pillow gives you coffee at four in the morning, a thermos with a dented lid.

The T-shirt, thin at the collar, hands you the morning he pulled it on, arm through the sleeve, head through the neck, a quiet house. His fingers know the hem. Under your palm the tattoo on his forearm, the stripes of a unit, gives you a desert, a boy of nineteen laughing in a truck bed with men who are not laughing now. He does not talk about them. A sergeant's chevron, and a funeral he stood at, in a borrowed tie.

His chest rises under your folded hands, broad and dense, built from ladders. The shoulders ache pleasantly, a climb's worth. His calves are tight. There is a taste in his mouth that is the memory of cigarettes, and under it a stubborn dry clarity: eleven hundred days without a drink, counted every morning like rungs. A church basement, folding chairs, a hymn he sings badly. A small savings account he checks like a pulse.

Your own breath comes slow. Silver shingles, traps stacked in the dooryard, the sea going gray beyond the glass. He has never slept like this, and you have never been anyone who did.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Freckled wrists, knuckles scarred pale, the chevron turning as you turn them over. They are warm and entirely yours.

You look up and say, quietly, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."