Patrick Lindqvist

You are standing behind a bar that is not yours, in a body that is not yours, and the ice machine is groaning in the dark. Gordon Pratt's forearms are crossed on the wood. Fifty years of carrying kegs live in his shoulders. The chinstrap itches. You have worn him for less than a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. It is not his fault. He is a good body. He is simply a body that stays put, with a short man's patience and a bartender's feet, and the thing that sent you back is not in him. It is in you, and it is quiet and particular, the way an itch is. You want to be tall somewhere. You want a room with a window in it that is not a bar's. You open the page. The wheel is already turning, and you do not decide so much as stop deciding not to.

Then the couch takes you.

There is a roar, and it is the television. Your mouth is open and dry, and a can is warm against your palm, sweating a ring into the cushion. Your body is lanky and light after Gordon's. You lurch forward, and your thumb finds the volume without asking you. It is precise and unbeer-like, a thumb that has done this ten thousand times. The ball is in the air. On the second replay you watch the ball and not the score.

The can is not beer. You lift it and tilt it, and the smell comes up flat and sweet and wrong: ginger ale. He never drinks. The aluminum is warm, and the warmth opens something.

His hands again, in the dark of a kitchen. A woman's voice says, you don't have to hold it like that, and he is holding a glass of club soda with both hands like a candle, three years sober from nothing. He was never a drunk. His father was. That is the whole reason, and he has never said it aloud to anyone but the priest. The feeling is pride so private it aches.

The cushion at your back is rough wool and smells of dust and a child's shampoo. A small sleeping voice, up the hall, a name you almost catch. One daughter. He checks the hall in his sleep. His right hand is already drumming on his knee, index, middle, ring, index, middle, ring. You watch it with interest. He did this on the roof at six in the morning, in January, with the frame going up behind him. The rhythm is for the cold and for the count of steel, and he has not smoked in four years. His fingers still go looking for the pack.

The shirt against your back is soft and gray and washed thin. This morning he pulled it over his head in the dark and stood at the closet in his boots, one sleeve and then the other, and the henley under the vest, the vest last. He kissed his wife on the temple while she slept. She smelled like sleep. She was warm. The pencil went in the left pocket, always the left. That was a long day. A beam came in wrong at ten, and he was the one who saw it and did not shout. He said the man's name quietly and the man stopped. Nobody got hurt. Nobody thanked him, and he liked it that way.

Under your bare feet the carpet is gritty. Another flash comes. A girl, before his wife, a laugh in a stairwell, a ring she handed back to him in a parking lot last spring and a text he has not deleted. He does not love her still. He cannot throw it out either. The shame is small and warm and holds on like a splinter.

The ring on your left hand is a plain band. You turn it with your thumb, once, because he would.

Then you hold your right hand up in the blue light of the game. The knuckles are cracked, the nails are clean, and the fingers are long and tired and steady. They are not Gordon's. They are not yours. You look up at the glass of the window, which gives you back a face with a short blond beard and hair standing in spikes.

"Huh," you say, and his voice is lighter than you expected. "Okay. Hi."

The crowd roars again. The hall stays quiet, and the fingers drum against your knee. You wonder how long this one will hold, and when the wanting comes back.