Ray Calloway

Liam's knees ache from the stock room floor, and I haven't even been him long enough to be tired of that. Seven minutes. His thumb is already worn raw from the box cutter, and his shoulders are narrow, easy, nineteen. The cooler hums behind him. Aisle nine smells like cardboard and floor cleaner. Nothing is wrong with him. He lifts and bends and does not complain. But a boy who stacks soup cans has never once been in a cockpit above weather, and I opened the site on his phone with his clean thumb because I wanted to be heavy with something. I wanted a life that had been paid for. I press the button, and Liam goes out like a pilot light.

The couch takes me. Wool, sweat, a lamp left burning. I am on my side with one arm folded under my head, and my neck is wrong with sleep. Light lies across my face in a hard bar. I turn from it, and then I turn back and open my eyes into it. It hurts, and I do not blink.

Heavy. That is the first thing. Gravity has more of a grip on me here, thirty-eight years of it, packed in the belly and chest and thighs. The air in my lungs comes slow and wide. My right leg is already bouncing against the cushion, and I let it.

The trousers are the first thing to speak. The fabric is stiff at the knee, and when I press my palm flat to it the night comes up. Gate lights through wet glass. A radio voice calling a hold. His stomach was tight with coffee, and he was proud of how steady his voice stayed. Then the morning before that, the same trousers going on one leg at a time, his hand cinching the belt to the notch it has worn for itself, and the small private sigh at how much farther out that notch has crept.

The boots are on the floor beside me, and my foot finds the laces and the shape of them. Eastern Kentucky comes in a rush: a cable footbridge over brown water, green shade, his boots ringing on the planks. He stood in the middle of it once and let it sway. He had a girlfriend who laughed at him for being afraid of it, and he was, a little, and he liked that she knew. I feel her hand on his sleeve, though not hers, his memory of it. It tastes like relief.

I touch my jaw. It is smooth. He shaved before he slept, out of a habit of order, and under my fingers the birthmark runs warm along the skin. A boy at school once asked him about it. He was seven. He remembers the exact tile he was standing on. He decided that day to be so competent that no one would ever get to the mark first.

I sit up. The foil crackles at the window. The couch springs complain. The quilt over the arm is hers or his mother's, I can't tell, and when I close my fist in it there is a smell of detergent and a Sunday, and a priest's low voice, and a prayer his mouth still knows all the way through. Hail Mary, full of grace. It does not fire for me. It only sits there, a door in a house I'm renting.

I hold my hands out in the bar of light. They are broad, thick across the knuckle, creased, and they have never once shaken on the controls. I turn them over. The palms are dry and calloused, and the fingers close the way they've closed ten thousand times on a throttle.

"Well," I say, and his voice comes out low and gravelled, a Kentucky lilt under it. "Hello, Captain."

My leg keeps bouncing. I don't know how long this one lasts. I only know that the wanting is quiet now, and I am listening for it.