Patrick Donnelly

You leave Mateo in a hurry of boredom, and it is the middle of the night in his city, the whole apartment asleep. He is eighteen, a little soft, with a mouth that tastes of the sugar he ate standing at the open fridge. For four minutes you stand in his kitchen with his phone lit in your hand. The thing is, he has nothing to want. He wants nothing and he wants it quietly, and you can't stand a body that doesn't pull. His thumb is already on the wheel.

Then the wheel stops, and you are sitting down.

Lamplight, a warm yellow. Your weight is in a couch that has given up in the middle. Something cracked is in your right hand, a fortune cookie, and the paper is half out, held between a thumb and finger that know exactly how to pinch it. You read it once. You read it again, slower. Your mouth keeps moving a word past the end of a line that short, and you don't know why.

The flannel comes first. It is soft at the cuffs and rolled to the forearm, and the cloth against your shoulders opens a morning. His hands, not yours, buttoning it in a dark bedroom so as not to wake anyone, stepping over a small shoe in the hall. A girl's laugh from a room down the hall, and something in his chest goes tight and bright. Two kids. The ring on the left hand is warm and a little loose, and when the thumb turns it, you get a kitchen and a woman's back at a sink. He is saying something he rehearsed, and she doesn't turn around. It is not a fight. It is the quiet after one, and it has lasted weeks.

The couch is rough under your palm, a blanket with a hole worn through. The takeout is cooling and smells of ginger and fried rice. The envelopes piled on the arm are bills, and the dread of them is his, familiar and heavy as a coat. He is doing well, on paper. Store manager, keys on his belt at work, a team that likes him. The money is not the trouble.

The tattoos on the forearm: a name in script, a date. Touch it and there is a hospital hallway, a smell of soap, a tiny weight in a blanket, and a joy so total it hurts your teeth. The other word is older, for someone gone. His thumb goes to his cheek, to the mole, without asking. A habit. Your fingers are rubbing at his face the way he does when he is afraid of something.

He quit drinking. The body remembers it as a hunger under the ribs that has gone quiet, the way a dog goes quiet that you stopped feeding. Thirty-eight years: a knee that complains, a lower back that is stiff from lifting pallets, shoulders strong from it too. The boots are laced tight. You are five-eight, steady, and heavier in the chest with feeling than Mateo ever was.

He had made a wish. You feel it at the edge, a held breath, the slip meant to answer it. It folds into quarters under your fingers and goes into his shirt pocket, over his heart, and the wish stays his, unread by you.

You turn the hand over. The ring, the script, the knuckles scarred pale. Then you lift your eyes to the dark window, where a stranger's face looks back with a mole high on the cheek.

"Well," you say, in a voice lower than you expected. "Hello, Patrick."

The cookie crumbs fall from your lap. Somewhere a floor above, a child turns over in sleep. You wonder how long this one holds, and whether the wanting is already starting, small, under the ribs.