Paul Rehbein

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films, the paperbacks with the cracked spines, the threads at two in the morning where strangers swore it happened to them. It's a Saturday, the middle of the day, and there is nothing in it. You have scrolled until the scrolling stopped meaning anything. Then a page with a wheel on it. You pay because you don't believe it. You spin because the paying is already done.

The wheel slows. A name you won't learn yet.

Dark. Weight first: a heavy, warm, sunk weight, face pressed into cotton that smells of sleep and detergent and someone's scalp. Your breath, his breath, ragged, catching on something. Then it evens out in one pull, and the arm that hangs off the mattress is yours, and you draw it up. The body rolls onto its back by itself, and the hands fold on the chest, a posture he has never once slept in. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the ceiling in a pale stripe.

Everything is heavy. A belly that rises under your folded hands. A stiff low back. A bladder. The mattress gives under shoulders that have carried things.

You move the left hand. The sheet is under it, thin and cool, and the sheet gives you something: a woman's laugh in another bedroom, a different bed, years back, the same cotton hand-me-down, and the feeling is not yours. It is plain, tired tenderness, and under it a flat ache like a pressed bruise. Then it is gone.

The flannel is on him. He fell asleep in it. You find the cuff at the left wrist and the button is hard under your thumb, and the cuff gives you the morning: he stands in the dark kitchen with coffee going, buttoning that sleeve one-handed, the right sleeve left for last because it takes longer. He tugs the cuff over the socket's edge and the cold carbon of it, and he does it without looking, a ritual so old it has no thoughts in it. Then comes the pencil behind his ear, the belt, the tape clipped on. Today he framed a wall on a fresh slab and the hose lay coiled like a sleeping snake. The compressor's thud sits in his chest now, and the smell of cut fir.

You turn your right hand over on your chest.

It is not a hand. It is a forearm of carbon and a wrist of steel, and you feel it only as pressure at the stump, a warm sleeve of silicone, the harness across your back. There is a phantom, too: a hand that isn't there closing on nothing, the ache of fingers that were taken a long time ago. The memory behind it comes up whole and ugly. A saw, a shout, a Saturday, nobody's fault, his own fault. A hospital ceiling. And the long learning of buttons.

With the left hand you rub your scalp, the thin hair, the hard bare temples, and the gesture goes by itself. Something comes with it. Three kids on a stoop, their wet coats, a boy holding his sleeve. A woman in a doorway who has stopped being his wife and has never stopped mattering. The ring finger is bare under your thumb, with its pale band, and the loss of it is a small stone in the stomach. Church basement coffee. A year he doesn't drink. An earlobe stud his daughter picked out, cold when you touch it.

The stripe of light holds on the ceiling. Somewhere below, a car hisses through the wet.

You lift both hands in front of your face. The left is broad, scarred and knowing. The right is metal. You open the one and close the other, and both obey.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice, rough with sleep. "Okay. Hello."

You listen to the house. You wonder how long you get to keep this: the weight, the ache, the quiet. The wanting is already stirring somewhere behind the ribs, patient and small, and you don't know whether tomorrow there will be a tomorrow in him.