Peter Dolan

You are standing in a glass office in Denver, and the man you are wearing has been in a meeting for an hour and two minutes. He is Ernesto Maldonado, and he has just been told, kindly, by someone younger, that the thing he built is going to be run by someone else. His moustache itches. His shaved head is cold from the air vents. His heart is sixty years old and doing fine, and he is bored of it. Nothing hurts. Nothing is wrong with him. You just want to be somewhere nobody is being kind to you. You spin.

Hedge. Green, wet-smelling, right at your shoulder. Your right hand has stopped mid-stride, a plastic handle in the palm, a cord drawn out thin in front of you. A small rough dog is nosing the leaves at the end of it. The dog looks up past the hedge, at you, ears flat.

The handle is warm from his grip, and it gives you a flash of him: a Saturday, a pet-store floor, three kids shouting over which dog, and him saying "this one looks tired, like me," and the youngest crying with joy. The feeling is soft and a little foolish. It is his.

The shirt is black cotton, washed thin, and it sticks to your back where the sun has found it. Pulling it on comes back in pieces: a dark bedroom, a drawer that sticks, the left sleeve first because the right shoulder clicks. A woman's voice from the bathroom asks if he's got the dentist forms. He says yes. He doesn't.

Your thumb finds a rough spot on the inside of your forearm. Under it is a little triangle, crooked and ugly. It brings back a night at twenty-one, a friend with a needle and a bottle, and a girl laughing. She was the one who got away, and he has never told his wife that the tattoo was meant for her. He feels the shame of it every time he rolls his sleeve.

Your gut sits warm over the belt of the cargo shorts. Your knees ache a little from the stairs, and your calves are tight. The sneakers are soft and flat on the concrete, and your toes know exactly how they wear. A ring presses the third finger of your left hand, plain and loose from soap. He prays some mornings, quietly, before the kids wake. He has almost nothing in the bank, and he is not afraid of it.

Your tongue finds the gap in your front teeth. A word is already waiting behind it, the kind that catches when he is pushed, and you can feel the stutter living in your hands too, a small tremor in the fingers around the handle.

You wind the cord twice around your fist. The dog watches. You start walking, and he has to learn your stride.

You turn your hand over. The ring, the tattoo, the knuckles with the dog's small pull along them. Then you lift your eyes and say, to nobody, to the street, "Okay. Hello."

Nobody answers. You do not know whether you will still be him when the leash runs out.