Raymond Tsosie

You are standing in a kitchen in Ohio with a mug going cold, and Neil Whitcomb's unibrow is a small weight you can feel when you frown. Five minutes in him. The coffee tastes of nothing. Down the hall the alarm for a Monday is about to ring in a house you have no feeling for, and a woman you don't love is turning over in a bed you didn't choose. Nothing is wrong with him. That's the trouble. He can do the spreadsheets, he can say the right words in the right voice, and you can feel how far it all is from the thing you wanted. You open the laptop on the counter. The page is where you left it, the wheel patient, the price small. You pay. You spin.

The mattress is under you before the kitchen has finished leaving. Dark. Blue light on your cheek, the phone six inches from your eyes, your thumb already moving, faster and steadier than whatever moved it a second ago. Everything he stopped on slides away under it.

Your shoulder is pinned under your own weight. The sweatshirt is cotton gone soft, and when the cuff drags across your wrist you get a flash that is not yours: a closet door, a hand pulling this one off a hook because the others are in the wash, and a woman's voice saying *you wear that thing like it owes you money.* He laughed. You feel the laugh in your ribs, and it's gone.

The socks are thick under your toes. A memory comes up through them, a cold tile floor in a doorway, him standing there at some hour like this one, listening to her breathe, not going in. The thing he did not say sits in your chest like a swallowed stone.

Your teeth find your thumbnail. You didn't send them. The edge is already ragged, and the taste is salt and old dirt. Under it a Sunday comes: his mother's kitchen, a rosary on a nail by the window, his hands being slapped away from his mouth, *Raymond, stop that,* and him doing it anyway, at nine, at thirty-seven.

The phone is warm. The ink on the back of your hand is blurred at the edges, anchors and swallows in faded blue and red. Nothing about them comes at first. Then the needle: a borrowed garage, a friend's cousin, twenty-one, the buzzing like a hornet in the bone, and a girl waiting outside in a car. Not the girl in the next room. The one who got away. You feel him still carrying the whole length of her, and you don't know her name.

Your back aches in the low place, from lifting, from bending. The mattress is thin, the springs known. Every muscle in your legs is tired from a day you never worked, in sun you never stood in, a lawn, a trailer of mowers at the curb, and under it all a number he does at night, never enough, rent against the week. Your knees remember kneeling to edge a border. The grass smell comes through the pillow, or through him.

You stop. Your thumb stops. You turn your hand over in the blue light, the knuckles scarred pale, the nails chewed down to nothing, a stranger's good strong hand, and it closes when you tell it.

You look up into the dark and say, quiet, so the room doesn't wake: "Okay. Okay, Raymond."

And underneath, already, the question: how long.