Paul Anthony Wozniak

Daniel's leg is the first thing I leave. It is Sunday morning in Pittsburgh, and I am sitting on the edge of his bed with the prosthetic socket standing upright against the nightstand, and I have been Daniel Whitefeather Lonetree for three minutes. In that time I have learned that the liner is damp and cold, that the stump has a pulse of its own, and that a mid-level manager's phone fills with small obligations before ten. There was a text from a woman named Carol about a quarterly review. I did not know what to do with it. I did not want to know. He is a good man, and every drawer I open is an hour of somebody's else's patience. I wanted a body I could walk out of a room in without a negotiation. So I open the site, and the wheel is already turning under my thumb, and I let go of his hands.

The chapel arrives all at once. The organ is dying on its last chord and the whole room is rising in a long wooden groan, and I am a half-beat behind it, a paper folded in my left hand. The floor is stone, and cold comes up through the soles of heavy boots. Black coat across my shoulders, borrowed, a little tight at the back. My breath goes in through a gap in my teeth, and I can feel the whistle of it.

My hands smooth the coat down, slowly, learning the buttons. Nobody looks back.

The order of service is the first thing that speaks. The paper is soft where his thumb has worried it, and it gives me a kitchen, a woman's voice saying *you don't have to go*, and under it his shame, because he is going and he has not told her why he'd rather stand at the back. The ex. The one who is dead. A girl at nineteen, laughing in a car with the heater broken. He has not said her name aloud in six years, and it comes up through his throat now like a swallowed coin: Marie.

The coat is not his. It gives me a stranger's shoulders, a neighbor's, lent in a hallway with a joke about funerals and fit. But under it the shirt is his, black cotton gone soft, and it hands me this morning in pieces: the sleeves, left then right, the cuffs buttoned with fingers that are short at the tip because he bites them. The collar he leaves open because the ink there is old and he is not ashamed of it. An eagle and a rose, the lines fat, the red long gone to rust. He did it at twenty-two on a bet he lost and never regretted. He stood in the bedroom while his girlfriend slept, and he looked at the buttons a long time and chose the one that made him look least like a man at work.

My feet feel the weight of a twelve-hour shift on a line, a standing ache in both heels. In his hands, a ghost of the extruder: plastic spooling out warm and endless, the hum of it, yellow foam plugs in his ears. A hundred thousand feet of nothing he made. He had thought, on the bad nights, that it was a kind of prayer. Cheap; the same motion, the same breath. He sat on his cushion in the cold apartment after, a drink or two poured and untouched beside him, and he counted until the line stopped sounding in his skull.

Somebody is singing off-key in the pew in front. The hymn carries me. I can taste the faint whiskey he did not mean to have this morning, and a long empty week under it, and the money he doesn't have. The grief is not mine. It sits in me like a stone I have been given to hold, and I hold it.

I look down. His hands are rough, square, the nails bitten to the quick. I turn them over. They are warm. They are mine now, and I don't know for how long.

I lift my eyes to the lens of whoever is watching, and the gap in my teeth shows when I whisper it.

"Sorry, Marie."