Raymond Atchak

You have read about this for years. The films, the threads at two in the morning, the long posts from people who swear it happened to them. It is a Saturday, the middle of the day, and nothing is on. You have scrolled until the thumb goes numb. Then a page with a wheel on it, and you pay because you do not believe it, and you spin.

The show cuts to a bright frame and you are sitting up straight.

The couch is under you, rough weave against the backs of your arms. The remote is in your right hand and you set it on the armrest. The room is dark except for the screen, and your leg is bouncing. It has been bouncing the whole time, a heel drumming the floor, and you cannot make it stop. A laugh track swells. You do not laugh.

Then the couch gives you things. The cushion is a Saturday three winters ago, and a woman's feet in your lap while you argued, loving it, about nothing. The feeling is warm and ruined at once. Her name is in it, and you cannot hold it. The afternoon turns to the afternoon she left, the car idling, and you standing in the snow in these same socks, not saying the one sentence. It sits in your chest like a swallowed nail.

The gray shirt against your back is soft from a hundred washes. This morning your hands pulled it over your head in the dark, before the cold truck and the framed-out house. Sawdust was still in the hem. Your hands know that morning: the left sleeve first, always, then the belt buckle worn smooth at one notch. The jobs come in thin, and the money is thinner. The shoulders ache from the day, the low back too, and the soft belly presses the waistband when you breathe. The hands are thick-fingered and calloused at the pads, and they know the weight of a framing hammer better than they know the remote.

There is a mug on the table, cold. When your fingers brush the handle you get his grandmother's kitchen, a smell of smoke and fish, a voice speaking a language he lost most of. The grief is old and clean, and it goes through you and out.

The screen throws blue across the books on the shelf. He reads, you realize. Nobody would guess it from the vest and the boots.

You lift both hands into the light and turn them over. Palms, creases, dust in the knuckles. They are yours now, and they do not feel borrowed.

You look up and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

The leg keeps bouncing. Somewhere under the wanting is the question you cannot stop asking: how long do you get this one? Until tomorrow, or until you want the wheel again?