Peter Lindqvist

You are standing in a stranger's kitchen light, except it is not a stranger's yet. It is Kyle Brandt's kitchen, in Pittsburgh, and you have his thumb on the edge of the phone, three hours of him in your knees. The warehouse is in them. Eleven miles of aisle a shift, and the scanner gun's weight is still in the right wrist. His arms don't reach shelves so much as get dragged to them. His gut sits over his belt like an apology. You have been him for two hours and fifty-nine minutes, and the whole time something small and bright has been sitting on the back of your tongue.

It is not that he is bad. It is that at the end of the shift a man on the loading dock said, "You good, Brandt?" and you answered in Kyle's voice, in Kyle's tired flat vowels, and the sentence you'd wanted to say was somewhere else entirely, in someone who would have known what to say. That is all. You could not do one thing you wanted with this body, which was stand in a room and have it feel like yours. So you open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb, the way it always is.

Now.

The fork stops. It is halfway to your mouth, and there is a bite of something warm and salty on it, and your arm has the weight of a wool sleeve hanging off it. You are leaning against a butcher-block counter with a hip against the edge. Your breath is slow, long, a lung that has been trained to count. Dark glass in front of you, a blue-black window with a lamp reflected in it. Quiet. A refrigerator hum. Someone else's evening, still warm.

Then it comes, through the fork. The steel is cool and thin, and the tines have been bent a little by a drawer. You don't think it, you feel it: a night shift, hands that have never trembled, a monitor's green line like a held note. A woman's voice in a car saying, *you're always at the head of the table, Peter, even here.* He is Peter. The shame in it is soft, like a bruise pressed. She left in March. He still keeps the second toothbrush in the cabinet and does not know why.

The coat is heavy on your shoulders, gray wool, a pea coat, the buttons dark and big. It tells you about this morning. His thumbs working the buttons while the radiator ticked, the L going over the street so hard the glass hummed, and a prayer said under his breath that wasn't really a prayer, just a habit of asking to be useful today. Under it, the scrub top he never took off: you can feel the soft cotton and the pocket where syringes ride. He slept two hours on the couch in it. His cap is in the bag by the door, you know that now, printed with green circuits his niece picked out.

The container is warm against your left palm, plastic gone soft at the rim. Your right hand, with the fork. You bring it close and the thumbnail is bitten to the quick, ragged at the edge, and the skin around it is raw. Your teeth know exactly where to go. A student loan number comes up from nowhere, enormous, and sits on his chest like a hand. He doesn't talk about it. Church on Sunday, the back pew, a man shaking his hand with both of his. Once or twice a month he drinks until the city is kind. Calves, shoulders, a runner's tendons, an athlete's tidy fatigue. A lower back that aches in the exact place of someone who stands bent over a head for six hours. Stubble rasps against your knuckle when you touch your jaw. Your cheeks lift on their own, and the dimples go in deep, even now, even with nothing funny.

You set the fork down on the counter. It rings once, small and clean.

You take off the coat, shrug it to the stool. You look at your hands, turn them over, the bitten nails and the steady palms, and then you look up at the black window, where a man with a kind face and tired eyes looks back.

"Hello, Peter," you say, quietly.

And underneath, already, the quiet question: how long.