Paul Brennerman

You are Glenn Whitaker for less than a minute, and you are already tired of him. You stand in his kitchen in Houston before the day has started, in his gray T-shirt, with his coffee going cold in a mug from some regional sales conference. The dark outside the window is still blue. He would be getting in the car soon. He would be good at it. That is the trouble. His knees are fine and his stomach is soft and comfortable, and he has a mid-level job that wants him by seven. You have wanted nothing in him since the first breath. He has a life that works, and a life that works is a closed door. Your thumb is already on the phone, and the wheel is already turning.

Then the power drops. Two seconds of dark, a hum cut off, and you are somewhere else with your arm pinned under a bright, biting, buzzing thing.

Green soap pools on the skin of your forearm. The needle works in short hot stitches. Your head is turned away, your jaw clenched until the muscle aches, and then the clench lets go, because you are not afraid of it. You turn and watch the needle write on you like it is happening to a chair. The room smells of ink, of latex, of old vinyl and cold coffee. It is mid-morning and the light through the front window is flat and white.

His body arrives all at once. He is six-two and the chair is too low, so your knees sit high. Your left hand rests on your thigh, and there is a pale stripe on the ring finger, a band-shaped absence. Your thumb goes to the tan line and rubs it without being asked. The right hand wants a pen. It wants to click one. It clicks at nothing.

The denim under your palm is soft and washed gray, and it gives you the morning. He stood in a bedroom with the blinds half up, and the black T-shirt came off the hook rather than the drawer, because the drawer was the ex-wife's side for eleven years and he still opens it like a trespasser. Left sleeve, right sleeve. The shirt smelled of the dryer and a little of the vape he'd had on the steps, the white marble worn hollow in the middle by a hundred years of other people's feet, the sun reaching the end of the block. Then the vest, the navy one with the store's name, hung on the doorknob, because tonight he would be back in it, straightening boxes on a shelf. Today was his day off. He had come here for something he'd promised himself.

The chair's vinyl peels against your calves. It gives you a different afternoon: a rowhouse hall, a woman's voice saying his name the way you say something you are done carrying. Paul. The ring went into a dish on the dresser and stayed there a month. You feel the shame of it, and under it a stubborn, dull love that did not leave with her. It is his, not yours, and it sits under your ribs like a swallowed stone. There was a church too, a plain white one, a hymn his mother liked, and he still stands for it in his head. There is also the drinking. Your mouth knows the dry morning after it, and your hands know the steadiness it takes to hide it. There is a small savings account, not a fortune, just something put away by a man who expected to need it.

The needle bites the soft inside of the forearm. It stings, but the sting is clean. His body takes it the way it takes everything, with a patient, bruised tolerance. Your breath comes slow. The dimples are in your cheeks even now. You can feel them at rest, like parentheses around a held remark.

You lift your right hand off the armrest. You turn it over. The knuckles are broad, a little scarred by cardboard, the palm creased and warm and wholly unfamiliar. The pale line on the ring finger shows. You look up, past the artist's bent head, to whatever is watching.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."