Russell Kessler

The suit I'm wearing is too tight across the shoulders, and I notice it because I have started noticing things about him, Andrew, the way you notice a coat in a closet you are about to leave. Thirty-nine years old, five foot seven, a beard I trimmed this morning with a little attention. The listing I was walking through had good light in the kitchen. A couple stood there deciding about a backsplash, and I stood there being a man who could be trusted with a house. Then I stopped listening. Nothing was wrong with him. He worked. But the wanting had come up under my sternum again like a tooth, so I stepped into the hall with my phone, said I needed to take a call, and opened the page with the wheel on it. Mid-morning in Seattle, a Tuesday, a stranger's granite counters behind me. I pay. I spin.

Cold. The first thing is cold, in the nose and in the cheeks, and the hum of a battery under my boots. I am standing on a forklift's platform with one glove on the wheel and my weight on my left leg, and the rhythm of the thing is already going through me without me. My arm does something wrong. A half second off, a lever pulled early. I do it again slowly and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, though the hands know them better than I do.

The wheel under my glove is worn smooth at ten and two, and it hands me something. A kitchen, not mine. A woman's voice saying "You're not here even when you're here," and his feeling, not mine: a flat, tired shame, because she is right. The hat on my head is wool and has gone stiff at the brim, and it gives me the morning. The dark apartment, the courtyard with its dry palms, his thumb working at the ring finger of the left hand where nothing is. He pulled the cap down over his buzzed scalp in the bathroom mirror, shaved smooth, a clean jaw, nothing to hide behind. The jacket zipper bites my chin. The vest crackles. The glove leather is cracked at the knuckle, and it gives me a Saturday years ago in a church basement, folding chairs, a ham dinner, her hand in this one. The boots are heavy. The left sole is worn on the outside edge, and there is a long knee ache I did not ask for, and a stiff lower back that has been lifting his whole life. A little money saved. He counts it at night, never spends it. The pallets tower to my left, and the concrete cold comes up through the soles. The tattoos on my wrist itch under the cuff, black ink from a bad year he never mentions.

I peel the glove off and look at the hand. Pale band on the ring finger where the sun never reached. I turn it over. Then I look up, past the open dock door, at the palms and the stucco and the late light, and say, to no one, "Okay. Let's see how long you last."