Roger Maynard

You have been awake since before the light, and the screen is the only bright thing in the room. It is Monday, early, the day not yet started, and you have scrolled past everything there is to scroll past. Then the threads again, the ones you have been reading for years: the man who wakes up in a stranger's kitchen, the story where the mirror is wrong. You have always wanted it. Nobody ever sold it. This page sells it. A wheel, a price, and you pay, because nothing else is on and because you do not believe it will work.

It spins. It stops.

Sunday evening, Kentucky. The air is cool and tastes of cut grass and somebody's woodsmoke. You are standing on a sidewalk with your weight on the heels of brown shoes, and your right hand is closed around a plastic grip with a thumb button under it. The leash runs out ahead of you, thin and taut, to a beagle with its nose in a hedge. A breath goes in and out of a chest bigger than you expected. It catches at the bottom, a small rasp, a pack a day settled in there like a tenant.

The dog looks up. Ears back. The line goes slack. You wind it twice around your hand, and your hand does it before you decide to.

The shirt first. Cotton, washed soft, maroon, loose over a belly that sits forward and warm. It brings the morning: Roger's hands pulling it from the second drawer because the first was his wife's, her side of the dresser smelling of lotion. He stood a moment at the bedroom window with no job to dress for. The listings were still open on the kitchen laptop, and he shut it on them like a lid on a pan. Then the jeans, the left leg first, a knee that clicks. Then the belt, a notch looser than last year, though the belly says otherwise.

The jeans give you more. Denim stiff at the thigh, a lighter in the right pocket, and the want for it comes up in your throat before the thought does. Behind it is a daughter at nine on a creek bank, and his arm going around her on a cable footbridge that swayed over brown water while she shrieked and laughed. The green shade came down off the trees, and he felt, plainly, that he would die for her and never say so. It is only a feeling in your chest, but it is large and it is not yours.

The ring is a thin pressure on your left hand. Under it, thirty years: a woman's laugh in a kitchen, her hand over his on a steering wheel, a quiet that is not empty. The black ink on both forearms itches in the cool. It was done at twenty-two in a shop with a buzzing sign, and he has never once regretted it. Under his feet the sidewalk is firm, and his lower back aches in a low, honest way. His shoulders are still strong from the years he hauled and lifted, and this body knows how to be stubborn.

Nobody knows about the mornings he sits in the truck outside the house and cannot go in to say another application went nowhere. You feel the shame, and under it the discipline of a man who has never touched a drink and does not need to explain why.

The dog tugs. Your stride lengthens, and the dog has to learn it.

You look down at your hand, the knuckles thick, the band bright, the leash wrapped red across the palm. You turn it over. Then you look up, at the hedge, the road, the light going gold.

"Well," you say, in a voice with gravel in it, "look at that."

Somewhere a screen is waiting. You wonder how long this lasts, and whether you will be him tomorrow.