Roy Lindahl

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember. The films, the stories, the threads at two in the morning, all of it a private hunger you never expected anyone to feed. Now it is a Saturday, the middle of the day, nothing on, the afternoon dull and flat on the screen in front of you. You found the page, vessel.cards, a wheel and a button and a price. You did not believe it. You paid anyway. You spin.

Then you are standing.

Your weight is on the soles of bare feet. A cool floor, a rubber mat underfoot. The kitchen is dark, and the dark is evening, a Friday evening, late enough that no one is coming. A green streetlight burns in the window. Your right thumb is lifted off glass. The phone shows a watch, and a price past anyone's rent. You turn it face-down on the counter. The hand that set it there does not pick it back up.

The shirt comes first. Soft flannel, washed thin, against your shoulder blades, and with it the morning: his fingers working the buttons from the bottom up, two cuffs rolled once, the cold gray of before-light, a hymn half-hummed through the wall. Then the counter under your left palm, laminate, sticky at one corner, and a flash of a woman's laugh over this same counter, a ring turning on a knuckle, the ring gone now. The tan line on your finger is pale as paper. A drum of fingers on the surface. You did not tell them to. They know a rhythm you don't.

The collar rubs the lettering at your chest. A name, a date. Something rises, a hospital hallway, or a church lot, you can't tell, and a grief that is entirely his, shaped like a held breath. It leaves without explaining.

The body: tall, long in the shins, ache low in the back from crates lifted all week, a stiffness in the right knee, shoulders strong in the dull, earned way. Hair on your neck, past its cut. The beard rough under your knuckle, gray at the chin. A faint taste of whiskey, one drink, maybe two. Under it, a ghost of old cigarettes.

On the counter, a packet of ramen. The ten minutes between him and sleep. A pang of shame about the watch, the phone, the wanting, the rent. Not yours. You carry it anyway.

You lift your hands into the light from the window. Turn them over. Calluses where you have none, a pale band on the finger. They are yours now, and they are not.

You look up at the dark glass, at a face in it, and say, low, "Okay. Hello."

How long? Years, or four minutes. The wanting is already stirring somewhere under his ribs, patient as a wheel.