Russell Dean Kluge

You are leaving Isaiah because of the route.

Three minutes in him, and he has already shown you what he cannot do. His legs know a satchel's weight and a hundred porches, and you don't. Two hours ago, before the spin, you stood in his kitchen holding the strap of the bag and felt his dread of a dog three blocks from here. It came up through the leather like a cold coin. You don't want a dog's teeth. You don't want to be good at being afraid of them. You stand in his dark kitchen in New Orleans at the dead center of Sunday night, the refrigerator humming, the screen lit in front of his freckled face, and you press the wheel.

Then you are lying down.

Your face is pressed into a pillow that smells of someone's scalp and old laundry. One arm is falling off the edge of the mattress and the blood has gone out of it; it prickles, then wakes. You haul it up. The body rolls itself onto its back without being asked, and the hands fold on the chest, a neat dead man's posture. His breath was ragged and now it is even, and that is you. A line of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the quilt like a ruler.

Then the shirt wakes up.

It is thin cotton, washed gray, and it is stuck to the small of his back with sweat. Touch opens something. A morning, his, in his feeling: the shirt is not this one but its brother, and he is pulling a work jacket over it in a cold truck cab with the heater not yet working, thumbs stiff, the zipper stuttering. His hands stutter. When someone watches him, a clipboard or a supervisor's eyes, the fingers lose their rhythm. He hates it. He has always hated it. He zips the jacket to the throat and thinks, *nobody look at me.*

The sheet under your calves is rough and tangled. It gives you a woman, not clearly: a kitchen, a laugh, her hand on his sleeve, and his chest going tight, years ago, with something he never said properly. Ex. Still the one he thinks of when the apartment is quiet. Under the pillow is a vape, and your fingers close on it. Mango. A parking lot, a friend's truck tailgate, a big night once a month, and the sweet cloud of it, the loosening of the jaw.

The body itself is thirty-seven and short, and it carries its weight soft around the middle. The lower back aches with a dull, familiar loyalty. The palms are rough, the calluses thick at the base of the fingers where a lever lives. They know a forklift's tiller before you do: the small forward push, the tilt, a pallet rising into cold air. You feel the warehouse in the fingertips, the breath showing, the stacked wood far above. Money is tight in this memory too. A number on a screen, a rent date, a church pew from childhood, wooden and polite.

Stubble scrapes your knuckles when you touch your jaw. Two days. His hair, you notice, is dyed red and flattened on one side by sleep.

The curtain moves. Phoenix is still dark.

You lift your hands into the streetline and turn them over. Thick fingers, scuffed, ordinary, his. They do not tremble. They are not watched.

You look up, past them, and say quietly, to nobody, "All right, Russell."

You wonder how long the wanting takes to come back. An hour, a year. Whether you wake in this tomorrow, or in someone else's dark.