Philip Sandgren

You are standing at a kitchen counter in Rural Texas before the light, in Travis Hollander's body, and the coffee has gone cold in his good mug. You have been him for less than a minute. Something about it is wrong in a way you won't say aloud. His wedding-ring finger is bare and the skin there is still pale. His knees ache. Nobody is up. The house is a held breath, and you are bored of it already, or you are afraid of it. It comes to the same thing.

The page is open. The wheel is a dull picture of itself. You pay, and you spin.

Then you are on your side in the dark with the phone six inches from your face, and your thumb is stopped mid-scroll. There is no travel and no warning. The screen is blue on one cheek, the sheet is cool under your hip, and your breath goes in long and slow, a sleeper's breath that has been interrupted. Your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than it was. It flicks past everything he had stopped on: a post, a post, a man selling a truck, a post.

The pillowcase is soft at your ear. Linen, washed many times. It gives you a flash that isn't yours. A woman's laugh in a car, years ago, her feet on the dash, and his chest going tight with the plain fact of wanting to keep her. The old girlfriend. He never said it to her and he still hasn't.

The T-shirt rides up against your ribs. It gives you a morning. He pulled it from a drawer in the dark so as not to wake anyone, and he stood in the hall outside a door with a night-light under it. Three kids are breathing in there, or were on his weekend. He put one palm flat on the wood and held it a moment. Then the numbers came, the ones he does in his head every night: the loan, the card, the second card, a hole so deep he has stopped looking over the edge. Under that sits a Sunday pew and a hymn he mouths and means. He prays at the ceiling, short and practical, like a man asking for a few more days.

Your free hand goes up without being asked and runs over the bare scalp, once, front to back. It is smooth and a little warm. His hand knows that road. A hundred meetings are in the gesture, a glass room with charts on the wall and the quarter coming up on him like weather. He is tall under the sheet, long in the shin, and one eyebrow has a pale cut through it. Your thumb finds it. He got it falling off a bike, a summer of gravel, his father shouting from a porch. It is the only soft thing in the memory.

You know Owen Kratzer's hands better than these. Twelve minutes ago you were him, thin and sore from a line, a lazy eye drifting while you worked. That body is somewhere behind you now like a coat on a hook. You think of the hot grease and of what you did in that kitchen, and then you let it go. Here the sheets are quiet and the street is dark. Your heart is slow and heavy, and a long man's tiredness sits in the back.

You lower the phone to the pillow. You lift your right hand into the blue light and turn it over: the knuckles, the pad of the thumb, the faint print of the sheet. Then you look up into the dark glass of the window and see a pale face there, looking back.

"Okay," you say, low, in his voice. "Okay. You'll do."

You listen to his heartbeat and wonder how long it lasts, and whether the wanting is already coming back.