Russell Hendricks

You are standing in a dead man's kitchen, you think, though nobody is dead. You are standing in a thirty-year-old's body, six-five, blond, dimpled, a fast food worker's forearms, and you have been him for less than a minute. He was fine. That is the trouble. He worked. He just could not do anything you wanted: you reached for the cold edge of the world and it was still only a fryer, a counter, a ceiling you kept almost touching. You open the page. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then it is a kitchen at night.

A mug is in your hands, warm against both palms, a ring of tea gone tan inside it. Coats hang on the hooks by the door. A steel dog bowl sits on the mat. There is no travel, only the weight: you are smaller, softer through the middle, and your jaw is clenched so hard your back teeth ache. You unclench it. It clenches again.

You set the mug down inside a ring it has made before. The counter is cool. Your fingers know the spot.

The plaid shirt is on you, soft with washing, and the sleeve against your wrist gives you a morning: his hands doing the buttons wrong, one off, fixing it, the lanyard on the chair already waiting. He was tired of hotel lobbies and of smiling at men who would not sign. A hymn was in his head. Not a good one. Everyone is asleep, and he is the only one who cannot be.

The mug's handle, still warm on your fingertips, brings a daughter's small hands closing around it, "careful, careful," and a woman's laugh in another room. Another woman's, years back, an old ex. He keeps her in a drawer in himself and does not open it. The drawer comes open anyway, an afternoon with rain on a car roof, and your chest goes tight with a grief that is not yours.

Your knees ache. Your belly sits over the belt. Your feet are sore in the black shoes. The spoon is in your hand before you decide: third drawer, first try. The metal is cold. The money, the quiet house with a turquoise wall somewhere, the faith he prays with: all of it lies under you like a floor you have not walked on.

You go down the hallway turning on lights ahead of yourself, and the switches are exactly where your hand goes.

You stop. You lift your hand into the light and turn it over: pale, soft, unfamiliar, a little shaking.

You look up and say, "All right. Let's see how long you last."