Raymond Tallchief

You are standing in a kitchen in Nashville that belongs to a man you have been for less than a minute. Clarence Whitfield's knees ache from the tile. His beard is rough under your palm. You came to the bathroom mirror and saw a face that did not owe you anything, and it was the owing that did it. Sixty-two years of a good man's life are in there somewhere, behind the cabinet doors you haven't opened, and you did not want to open them. You wanted not to be somebody's retired anything. The house is asleep. The refrigerator hums. You pay, you spin, and the wheel clicks down through its small teeth.

Cheeks full. The candle is a bright wick an inch from your face, and the breath is already leaving you, so you finish it. The flame bends and dies. The kitchen goes black. Then a second breath goes in that you did not start, deep and cold, and the lungs take it as though they had been waiting. Your hand pulls the candle out of the icing. You hold it up, and the smoke climbs straight as a thread.

Wax and sugar. Frozen frosting on your thumb. The flannel hangs soft on your shoulders, and it gives you the morning first. His fingers, thick at the tips, did the buttons wrong and did them over. He stood at a bedroom mirror in a gray undershirt and parted his hair with a wet comb to the hard side, the way a boy does when he is told it makes him look serious. It did. The courthouse steps came with it, a briefcase strap cutting his palm, and wind off the lake like a slap. The jeans are stiff at the knee, bought for evenings that never get used. He is small and he has always been small. Five foot four, and he built a voice to stand in for the rest. The floor is cold through the canvas shoes. The table edge presses his thigh, and the wood remembers a mother's table, a different one, a different kitchen, a rosary left looped on a chair back. The paper by the glass is a brief he did not finish. He has money, more than he ever says, and the house is quiet anyway. Somewhere an old girlfriend's name sits in him like a swallowed stone. She isn't coming. He bought the cake himself, at the grocery, and carried it home flat in both hands under the elevated tracks while a train shook the whole street. His teeth have a gap in them. The tongue finds it and he is thirty-seven, and wished for something small. You do not get to know what. The thumbnail is bitten to the quick, and the habit lives in your hand now.

You turn the hand over. Short nails, chewed ragged. Brown, steady, a stranger's.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, where the train light slides across the glass.

"Happy birthday," you say, in a voice that is lower than you expected.

How long, you wonder, before the wanting comes back.