Patrick Gallivan

The page is open and the house is quiet, and it is late enough in the evening, and dull enough, that I have run out of reasons not to. I have read about this for as long as I can remember: the films, the stories, the threads that go on past two in the morning. Someone wakes up in someone else and looks down at a stranger's hands. I never thought it could be bought. There is a wheel on the screen, it turns, and I pay.

Then I am standing up, and the stirring stops mid-circle.

A wooden spoon is in my right hand. Steam comes up against my face, and I smell onions gone soft and the sharp edge of the pan. The window on my right is full of low gold light. My feet are planted in sneakers with the heels worn flat. I start the spoon again the other way, because that is where the hand wants to go. I salt the pan from a pinch I did not decide on, and I do not taste it. Then my left hand reaches up to the cabinet, takes down a second plate, and sets it beside the first on the counter. The china clicks against the other plate. I did not choose that either. It was a habit, or a hope, and it has not yet been told it is out of date.

His hands already know all of this. I just stand in them.

The flannel is soft with washing, and it drags a little across my shoulders when I move. It gives me the morning first. He sits on the edge of the bed and does the cuffs up one button at a time, left and then right, thumbnail finding the buttonhole without looking, and a whole mood comes with it: tired, flat, but not unhappy. The jeans have a stiff patch on the thigh where something burned and dried. He stepped into them standing, one leg and then the other, hopping once, and I feel the little shame of an old hole at the pocket that he keeps meaning to fix.

My jaw is working on nothing. There is a ghost of gum there, a habit with no gum in it, and the chewing goes on regardless. The stubble across my chin is rough under my knuckle.

Then the spoon handle gives me more. It is worn smooth, and it was hers. She bought it at a market, laughing, and said he should stop stirring with a fork. The memory comes with a hurt I did not earn. It is her voice in this kitchen, and the second plate, and the way he kept setting two for a week after she left, and told no one. His back aches low from ten hours bent over steel. The shoulders are strong. The palms are scored with calluses that catch on the cloth.

I am the roommate, and I know that too. I know it the way you know a stranger's name on a mailbox. He is the one who leaves the light on over the stove, and he prays over this food before he eats it, quietly, when he thinks nobody is listening.

I take my hand off the spoon and hold it up in front of me. The knuckles are broad. There is a pale burn shine on the side of the thumb, and grit is still ground into the creases. I turn it over, and it turns. Then I look up.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that is lower than mine and not mine, and my own mouth sounds strange to me. "Okay. It worked."

The pan hisses. The second plate sits there, waiting. I do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether I am still him tomorrow.