Owen Tyler Brandvold

You are standing in Travis Oberlin's kitchen with his coffee going cold in his big square hand, and the light over the Denver rooftops has not yet decided to be morning. Twenty-one days and twenty-two hours. The moustache has stopped surprising you in the mirror. That is the trouble. Nothing in him surprises you now. His knees ache the way a muscular man's knees ache, his truck smells of two-stroke oil, and his phone holds a sister who texts you as if you were him. You thought a landscaper's body would feel like being useful. It feels like a coat someone else broke in. You put the mug down and open the page with the wheel on it. Your thumb knows how to pay. You are leaving him on the counter like the coffee.

The wheel turns, and the kitchen goes.

Cold. It is the first thing, cold in the nose and teeth. Both hands are shut on a rope as thick as a wrist, and it is rough and damp, and the weight of a bell hangs somewhere above you. Your breath leaves in a cloud. Stone steps lie behind you and dark lies all around. Nobody is awake anywhere in this city. You pull. The bronze swings and speaks, and the sound is huge in the empty night. You let go of the rope and clap twice, and the claps are small and flat. You bow, and the bow goes lower than you meant. You hold it with your forehead toward the cold stone, and then you come up level and exact.

The jacket is first. Its nylon whispers against your wrists, and the zipper is pulled to the chin. Then it arrives without asking: a December morning in a cramped room, a radiator ticking, his thumbs working this same zipper while his mother's voice came through the wall. He had put the jacket on over the work shirt because the heat in the van was broken. He was nineteen and tired in a way sleep did not fix. The jacket still smells faintly of cut grass and of wintergreen.

Your tongue finds a toothpick at the corner of your mouth, chewed soft. Your hand lifts to it without being told. Behind it comes a tin of dip in a glove box, a promise to quit by spring, and the number on a letter he keeps folded in his wallet. You can feel the number even though you cannot read it. It is big and has a minus in front of it, and it sits in his stomach like a swallowed stone. The wish he made at the bell was small and embarrassed. It was not for money. It was for someone to be proud of him.

The boots are heavy and wet at the toes. They give you a lawn in sideways rain, a mower throttle that shakes his forearms numb, and a crew boss who called him "Smurf" until it stopped being funny and became a kind of love. The dyed hair is flat with damp under your fingers. He did it himself in a bathroom sink on a drunk Saturday, and he has never regretted the blue. The beard is thin and patchy against your knuckles. He keeps hoping it will fill in. His chest is small and strong, and his shoulders are tight from months of hauling. Your calves burn pleasantly from the steps. You are five-foot-five, and the world is lower than you were used to.

You lift your hands into the lantern light. They are scraped across the knuckles and the thumbs are calloused, and a rim of black soil is stuck under every nail. These hands are very young and have been working for years. You turn them over once, slowly, and then raise your eyes to look straight ahead.

"Okay," you say, and your voice is lighter than you expected. "Hello, you."

The bell is still humming faintly in the dark. You wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back.