Prakash Narayanan Iyer

You are standing in Ernesto's kitchen in Anchorage with the light still blue in the window, and his knees already hurt on the cold tile. He keeps a good body. He runs, he has a good job, and the coffee he made tastes like nothing. Four hours ago you had a wife's side of the bed in this house, and a daughter's voice in the hall, and none of it is yours. You rinse the cup and notice that you have done it exactly the way he would. That is the trouble. It all fits you perfectly and none of it is you. You open the page and the wheel is already turning.

Then there is a hot, green, loud morning, and the pull cord has just stopped in your fists.

You are bent over a mower at a curb, in a small town where the one stoplight hangs red over an empty road. Sweat is running down your ribs. Your belly sits soft over your belt and your shoulders are strong under it. The handlebar is warm and gritty in both hands. Your hand moved wrong a half-second ago, so you do it again slowly, correctly. Choke, prime, grip. Then ten more times, each one checked, though your hands could have done them asleep.

The handlebar gives you the first memory. It is not yours. It is his father's hardware store in a city far from here, and a boy holding a rake that is taller than he is. The shame of being the one who is brown in a school hallway comes with it, and then a different feeling, pride in work that does not need anyone's approval. Your thumb finds a pen in the shirt pocket and clicks it, click, click, and you do not know why. Then you do: a kitchen table, bills spread out, his wife across from him, and the click that always means he is worrying but will not say so.

The shirt is soft denim, washed thin, and it sticks to your back. Under it comes the morning. His arms went into the sleeves while his wife was still asleep, and he rolled the cuffs twice, the way his father did. The wedding band caught on the button, and he smiled at it. Two children were upstairs. The goatee needed trimming, and he ran his thumb along it and decided it could wait. The mud on the trousers is from last week's drainage job, and the knees are stiff with it. His boots are laced tight because his left ankle complains. It is a small ache, and you can feel it now.

His hair is dyed. A hand goes to the hat, and you feel the vanity in it, the careful comb-over, the way he checks the mirror every morning and tells no one. The nose ring tugs. He got it at nineteen against his mother's wishes, and he never took it out. There is an old girlfriend too, a name that rises and goes before it comes clear, a summer, a car, a gentle ending. He thinks of her rarely and without pain. He does not drink and never did. Some nights he sits on the porch and feels something larger than himself, and does not call it God.

The trailer ticks in the heat behind you. Across the street the old diner stands closed, its sign faded. The mower catches, then dies.

You lift your hands off the bar. They are broad, the knuckles cracked with dirt, the ring pale on the left. They are someone's hands and they are shaking slightly, just a little, as though they know.

You turn them over and look up. "Okay," you say. The voice is lower than you expected, and warm. "Hello, you." You wonder how long he lasts, and when the wanting comes back.