Russell Kent Aldous

You are standing in a kitchen in New Orleans at nearly midnight, in the body of a twenty-nine-year-old electrician, and the thing that sent you back is in your own knuckles. Dominic's right thumb has a split along the nail that will not close. Five minutes ago you picked up a bottle of Abita and could not feel the cold of it. You have worn him for the length of one cigarette he never smoked, and already you know what he cannot do. He cannot be anyone you haven't been. The beard itches. The wheel is open on the laptop, turning slowly, a page with a patient light on it. You press the key.

Pavement, wet. A sidewalk under shoes that are not Dominic's, the cold arriving first, thin and clean, rain held in the air without falling. A streetlight hums somewhere above and behind your left shoulder. You are standing still at the end of a thin cord, and the cord is pulling gently toward a hedge where something small is breathing in the leaves.

The dog looks up. Ears flat. It knows. You feel the leash go slack in a hand that has stopped walking.

Then the hand moves, and you let it. The cord comes in around the fingers, twice, snug. It is the hand that knows how. The plastic handle is warm and slightly tacky, worn smooth where a thumb rests on the brake, and the thumb finds the brake without you.

The handle opens the first one. A Saturday, a backyard, a boy on a bike with training wheels coming down the drive, and a feeling like a fist unclenching in the chest, pride so total it embarrasses him. Two children. The girl's name arrives as a taste, not a word. Then the handle gives you another, older and colder: a courthouse hallway, a woman with her coat already on, and the same chest, tightened. An ex-wife. He still sends her the birthday texts.

The hoodie sits heavy across the shoulders. Pull the zipper and you get the morning: the closet door, the dark blue one chosen because it was the one on top, his wife asleep with her back to him, the quiet way he works the zipper so it won't whine. His left hand in the hoodie pocket finds a receipt, a pen cap, lint. His ring turns against the cotton, a plain band, and with it comes a pew, a folding chair, a church basement of coffee and grown men praying badly and honestly. He believes. It is a floor under him, not a thing he thinks about.

The jeans are soft at the knee. The shoes are old trail shoes gone gray, and the left one rubs at the heel. Under them the sidewalk comes up through the soles, and with it a mezzanine walkway, steel grating, a distribution floor roaring below, forklifts beeping, a clipboard against his hip. He is good at it. He knows which pallet is wrong before the scanner says. He is tired in a way sleep does not touch, because money is thin, under five thousand to all his name, and the numbers sit behind his eyes at night like a second ceiling.

The body is forty-seven and honest about it. A low ache in the lower back that wakes when you stand still. Strong thighs, long legs, a chest that breathes deep and slow. The scalp is cold and bare, the jaw smooth, the air stinging where he shaved it this morning, the razor pass remembered stroke by stroke. A beer once or twice a month, a big night, then nothing, and tonight is none of those.

The dog is still looking at you.

You lift your right hand into the streetlight and turn it over. Long fingers, a pale band of skin under the ring, the palm printed faintly red by the cord. You close it. It closes.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower than you expected, a little hoarse with rain. "Come on, then."

The dog does not move. Somewhere behind your ribs, the wheel is already a faint light, patient, asking how long.