Patrick Joseph Dolan

You are leaving Samir Haddad Khoury at the hour when the pans are scrubbed and the walk-in hums its one flat note. He has been yours three hours and twenty-four minutes. His forearms still ache from the long shift, and the scar across his broken nose itches when you breathe in. You stand in his dark kitchen with a glass of water you have not drunk. There is nothing wrong with him. He is a fine body. Black stubble, brown eyes, a good palate, a steady knife. What sent you back is this: you tasted the stock he had left on the stove, and you knew it was perfect, and you felt nothing. It was perfect for someone who had spent twenty years making it so. You are only wearing the knowing. You put the glass down. The wheel opens on the phone, and you spin.

The arrival is a drop with no floor. The kitchen is gone and your face is pressed into cotton, your mouth tastes like old vape and something sweet gone flat, and your whole body is heavy with a sleep that was not yours. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has pooled in it. Your breath is ragged, then it is not. You roll. The arm swings up on its own, and your hands fold on your chest like a man laid out. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains. Somewhere close, a train goes over steel, and the whole room hums with it.

Then the memories come, through whatever touches you.

The sheet is under your fingers, the cheap kind, pilled. Her side is cold and smells of her shampoo. A name rises: a woman, asleep somewhere else tonight, or on the couch. You had a fight about money. The number sits in him like a stone, underwater by a sum he says aloud only in the shower. You feel his shame at it and his stubbornness.

The shirt on your chest is a soft black tee, worn thin. He put it on this morning in the bathroom, or last night. Sleeve by sleeve, you feel his arms go in, his big hands knowing the neck hole. Under the left sleeve is script lettering, a name and a date, and when your thumb passes over it the flash is a hospital hallway and a plastic chair and a hand that went slack. He got it done the week after, drunk and sober at once, and has never explained it to her.

The carpet under your heel is rough, and beyond it your feet find his work boots, where the shift left them. The memory is of the school after everyone is gone: the corridor floor going wet and bright under the mop, the keys at his hip that open every door and none that matter. He likes it. Nobody asks him anything. When the principal speaks to him his words catch on the first sound, a stutter that clamps his hands into fists, and he has learned to nod instead. In the empty corridor he talks to himself without a single catch, and it comes out smooth.

Your body is tall and long, six foot three, strong in the thighs and shoulders, thirty-one years old. The lower back aches from bending over buckets. Your tongue finds the dry gum taste of nicotine. A drink or two had put him under, and you feel the warmth of it still, loosening his jaw.

You lift your hands into the light from the curtain gap. They are big, knuckled, cracked at the creases from cleaning chemicals. You turn them over. The tattooed forearm follows. You look up, into the dark, and your voice comes out low and steady, with no catch at all.

"Well. Hello, Patrick."

Beyond the window the train fades. You wonder how long he lasts, when the wanting will find you in him, and whether you wake here tomorrow.