Peter Halvorsen

You are standing in a kitchen in Honolulu, in the middle of the night, in Casey Lindqvist's bare feet, and the tile is cool and the refrigerator hums, and you have been him for less than a minute. He was a sales rep. He had a beard that itches under your thumb. You came back to the page anyway. Something about the beard, the blue eyes in the dark window, the way he is so entirely finished, a man with nothing left in him to find out. You press the wheel and the kitchen goes.

Rain. It is on your face before you know you have a face. You have stepped out from under the shelter a beat early, hood falling back, and the water runs into your eyes and down your jaw, smooth, freshly shaved, nothing to catch it. Your head is tipped up. You do not turn out of it. You have not been cold in a long time, and this cold is clean.

The board behind you says 3 MIN. The jacket is slick and heavy across your shoulders, and when your fingers close on its zipper pull, a flash comes that is his and not yours: a hook by a door, a bad Tuesday, his hand shoving a wet sleeve through at five in the morning, hurrying, because a day shift starts early and the charting never waits. Under the jacket the hoodie is damp at the cuffs, and the cotton gives you a long gray afternoon on a bungalow porch, mountains behind the rooflines, a woman's voice leaving, the screen door's small sound. Ex. Recent. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and you feel it as his, not yours, a tenderness he has not told anyone.

Your thumb finds the small silver hoop in your left ear, cold with rain, and you get a mirror, a friend's dare years back, the sting, laughing. In your pocket there are keys, and the badge clip knocks against your hip, and the ring of them opens a locker, a break room, a cigar at the end of a night, smoke he lets out slowly behind the loading dock, a thing he does alone and calls prayer, the closest he comes. The body is thirty-four. The knees know stairs. The belly is soft and warm under the wet, and the calves ache with twelve hours of hallway. His feet are in black shoes that hold water now, and they have walked a thousand miles of linoleum. You feel what his hands already know: the quick two-finger pulse, the tuck of a blanket, the capped needle set down gently.

The bus is coming. You can hear it in the street, the hiss.

You lower your face from the sky and lift your hand in front of it. Rain beads on the knuckles. You turn it over, palm up, and watch the water pool in the lines.

You look up, into the dark, and you say, "Cold. Good." And underneath it, the quiet question that is always there: how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him when this bus pulls in.