Ronald Aksel Dahl

You leave Owen Prescott on a Tuesday morning in Atlanta, in the middle of his own cooking oil smell and his own unpaid rent. He is twenty-three and all elbows. You were never hungry in him the way he was hungry. Every door in that body opened onto a lobby with nobody at the desk. You had a body that worked, and it had nothing in it, so you pay again, and the wheel turns.

Green light, from below. The coin is on your thumb and it leaves.

It falls without turning once. The splash goes inward, wrong, a hole closing on itself, and you are standing at a stone lip in a mall that has stopped being busy, with water lit like a bottle and a flannel shirt heavy on your shoulders. The cold of the building is on your scalp. Nothing is on top of it. The head is bald and the air finds all of it.

You are heavier than Owen. The weight sits low and settled, a belly under the shirt, knees that file a small complaint when you shift. Fifty-nine years in one frame. Your breath comes slow and deep and a little rough at the bottom.

The flannel goes first. Its collar scratches the back of your neck and then it opens like a drawer: a closet in the dark before work, the hanger clicking, and his hands doing the buttons from the bottom up, because that is how he has always done them. His wife is asleep with her back to the lamp. He lets her sleep. He put the gray T-shirt on first, the soft one, and pulled the flannel over it, and thought, without words, that the morning was going to be cold enough to hurt.

You touch your thumb to the ring. The metal is warm and loose, worn thin on the underside. A different afternoon comes, a kitchen, a child's loud voice, and a feeling that sits under it like a floor: *I have been given more than I earned.* He says that to himself in church, he says it to the ceiling, he says it carefully, the way a man handles something he is afraid of dropping. He never drinks. The thought of it makes his mouth go flat. Once he smoked, and your lungs remember wanting to, a ghost itch behind the sternum.

Your fingers find a badge clip on the belt, and an office opens, glass on three sides, the door always left open on purpose so people can walk in with bad news. He is good at bad news. He says *Okay, let's look at it*, and the room breathes out. It is a small gift, and nobody has ever thanked him for it.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. The shoes are old and shaped to his feet, not yours. Under them the tile is hard, and from it comes a different ache: standing here last week, and the week before, in the same place, wishing the same wish. The memory is not clear. It is a woman's name he does not say aloud, a girl he used to know, recent and unfinished, and the wanting is not for her exactly. It is for being someone who had chosen differently. His chest tightens around that, a private knot, and you let it go by. It is not yours.

Under the knot is money, quiet and sufficient, numbers he looks at and does not enjoy. Snow on a blue tarp, a snowmobile he hasn't started since fall, plywood siding, light going amber over the yard. A cheek that itches, high up. You touch the mole with a fingertip, and it is only skin.

You lift your hand and look at it. Broad, square-nailed, with gray hair across the knuckles and the thin gold band. You turn it over. The palm is creased and warm, and it does exactly what you ask.

You look up, and say, low and a little hoarse, in a voice that is not yours yet, "Well. That's a good one."

The water keeps lighting from underneath. You don't know how long you will have this. You close the hand and the weight of him closes with it.